Download gzipped and tarred UNIX/Linux versions of the package
or the individual files needed on Windows PCs.
I'm an applied mathematician with a PhD from the University of
Washington in Seattle, USA, and currently work at the Fraunhofer
Institute for Industrial Mathematics in Kaiserslautern, Germany.
My research interests are in the numerical solution of partial
differential equations and in optimization. In both areas,
it is sometimes necessary to consider quantities changing
with time or corresponding to the steps of a solution process.
My favorite visualization tool is MATLAB, and my preferred way
of communicating is via the internet -- at least compared with
the usual research articles. Over the last 4 years, I have found
this attitude to be also extremely helpful when communicating
the usefulness of mathematical methods and software to industrial
customers, who do not usually have a background in mathematics,
but rather very practical problems. Visualization and animation
can quickly convey that I rally have something to constribute
towards their needs. Thus, I have also written extensive tools
for this purpose besides this matlab package.
MATLAB comes with its own movie commands, but they are not
directly suited to put movies on the WEB: Matlab's movies can
only be played with MATLAB, they are generated slowly and
consume enormous amounts of disk space when saved. The same
disk space and memory requirements exist when you use the mathworks
own mpegread and mpegwrite commands.
Since 1994, MPEG seems to be evolving as the (commercial) standard
for animation. Many PCs are now sold with built-in hardware to
display movies in this format. Another popular format is GIF.
These two formats are supported by my MATLAB movie package.
The package specifically provides a Matlab interface to
the University of California at Berkeley's mpeg_encoder
and Rene Mueller's gifmerge software. Both create animations
from sequences of gif images.
The package extends MATLAB to provide those collections of
gif images and to access some of the options of the above
mentioned software conveniently from within Matlab.
Specifically the commands are
makeframe --- to generate a single image in gif format
makemovie --- to generate movies in MPEG and Gif89a formats
from the images generated with makeframe.
This package is not a movie viewer; any internet browser will
display its output.
Here you see the movie simple.gif, which is created as an
example by the package. If you have set up your browser
correctly, clicking on it will start an mpeg_player with
the same simple in mpeg format -- 7 times smaller than the
gif version. The quality is higher if you create figures with
less than 256 colors and do not use the quantify option, which
is otherwise needed due to the gif format limit of 256 colors.
For more sophisticated examples, please check out the following sites:
- Joern Sesterhenn has used ideas from this package to create
gif movies from Fortran, animating Lock Exchange flows.
- Professor Randy LeVeque has used the package to
animate results from his AMRCLAW Package.
- I use the package to explain the workings of my numerical
method for elliptic pdes with non-smooth solutions, EJIIM.
If you have a fast network connection, check this out.
To install the movie package under UNIX/Linux, you should execute
tar xzf movie_v5.tgz
That creates a new directory Movie. You can move the Movie
directory whereever it is convenient for you. Next,
cd Movie
Move the other *.tar.gz files (with platform-specific
executables) you received to this Movie directory as well.
install_movies
install_movies edits the site-specific sections of the
files makeframe.m, makeparams and makemovie.m. The variable
packagedir has the full path to the matlab movie package,
which is the directory in which you run install_movies. (If
you want to change the location of the Movie directory,
simply run install_movies again in the new directory. In
that case, don't worry about error messages that
install_movies could not find certain files, by moving
the Movie directory that portion of the installation
remains intact.)
When you run install_movies, an e-mail is sent to
andreas@familie-wiegmann.de that you did so. This is due to
curiosity of the author and to find out how useful this package
may be. If you feel that it violates your privacy, please feel
free to comment out the corresponding lines in the
install_movies file.
In multi-user environments, one copy of the package may be
used system wide, by setting the file read, write and
execute permissions in the Movie directory (and
subdirectories) appropriately and notifying all users of
the location of the package.
Include the path to the matlab movie package (under MATLAB)
with a statement similar to:
path(path,'/user7/awiegman/Matlab/Movie') --- Matlab 4
addpath('/user7/awiegman/Matlab/Movie') --- Matlab 5, 6
where the path in single quotes is where you installed the
movie package.
Alternatively, include it in your .cshrc file, similar to
setenv MATLABPATH /user7/awiegman/Projects/Matlab/Movie
Try
help makeframe
and
help makemovie
under Matlab as well.
Try
type simplemovie
or
type moviedemo
under MATLAB to see examples of how to generate movies.
Executing simplemovie should generate the files
simple.mpg and simple.gif
as they come with this package and included above in this
document.
- Gif Animations of figures with more than 256 colors are
not created at all. This is a limit of the Gif image format,
not my package. This package uses ppmquant to scale down
down the color space, but ideally this should be done by
the user for all frames in the same manner. The ppmquant
executable is not yet available for all platforms, and
is buggy on the windows platform.
- Switching desktops while creating the frames (with new,
higher quality version) puts part of the current desktop
in your movie.
- On SGI machines, the correct directory name may be SGI64, not
SGI as is currently the case. Please let me know if you have
a definitive answer to the question: Is the computer variable
on SGI always set to `SGI64`?
Creation of this package was made possible by the advent of
Matlab, UNIX and the Web. Other than Matlab, most of the needed
software is available as source code from various sites listed
below.
For convenience, I distribute all needed executables for
Windows, Linux, SGI, DEC Alpha, Sun SPARC and HP700 workstations.
The UC Berkeley mpeg_encode:
ftp://mm-ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/mpeg/encode/
and mpeg_play: Executables for DEC Alpha, HP7000, Sun SPARC and
for many other workstations may be obtained from the Geometry
Center at the University of Minnesota:
http://www.geom.umn.edu/software/download/mpeg_play.html
The player is not part of the package and called only in the
demonstration files moviedemo.m and simplemovie.m
Executables of the pnmcut and giftopnm programs by Jef
Poskanzer are also included. The pbm package is available
from netlib and many other sources.
Finally, executables of Mark Podlipec's txtmerge, improved to
gifmerge by Rene K. Mueller, are included.
http://smurfland.cit.buffalo.edu/xanim/xa_gifs.html
and
http://the-labs.com/GIFMerge/
Matlab version compatibility:
I have extensively tested the movie package version for
Matlab 4.2c. A new version of the package for Matlab 5, 6
is available as of 12/13/1997. For help with other versions
of Matlab feel free to contact me at
andreas@vicmasoft.com
Disk Space:
If mpg_encode, mpeg_play, gifmerge, pnmcut or giftopnm are
available on your system, you may want to replace the
executables of the files with links to the appropriate files,
or change the paths in makeframe, makeparams and makemovie
appropriately.
Supported Architectures:
Currently, the package is self-contained for PCs under Windows 95,
and Windows NT, DEC Alpha, SUN SPARC, SGI and Hewlett-Packard
HP7000 workstations.
Porting the package to different architectures:
It is fairly easy to assemble all the necessary files for
other architectures from the internet (see the Credit section
for URLs). Slight modifications of makeframe and makemovie
are needed, as well as new directories containing the
executables for the new architectures. Naming conventions
for the directories are those of Matlab, the new directory
(e.g. SUN4 for Sun SPARC workstation) needs to contain the
same files as e.g. the ALPHA directory, but compiled for
the new architecture. For demonstration purposes, a file
install.sun is included, that searches the system for some of
the necessary file from the pbmplus package and puts them in
the right locations. (Needed back when I did not have all the
executables for SPARC stations.)
Debugging:
In case either makeframe or makemovie does not work, you may
want to consider calling it with all options and a dummy
variable, e.g. makeframe(i,[240,192],'debug');
or makemovie(0,13,'demo',10,1,'all','debug');
This generates extra information on what particular portion
of the package is being executed.
Update for Matlab 5, 6: - The commands do NOT support
the debug option anymore.
- The arguments in makemovie have changed,
necessetating internal gymnastics to
ensure compatibility with Matlab 4.