Holcombe:MakingDemos

SUPA Sydney University Perception and Action Lab Primer editing help refcard

Making animated demos

• Using Psychopy or Visionegg you can create a gif. Then you import the gif using Adobe Flash. You can adjust the speed manipulating the frame duration (Modify document). Finally, you export the file as a swf.

• Patrick normally makes short movies a frame at a time in Keynote and then makes them into movies with Quicktime 7 Pro.
• In past years, Quicktime Pro could be used to create movies from a bunch of still frames. Quicktime Pro is no longer supported, however it is possible to still run Quicktime 7 Pro if you manage to find a Quicktime Pro-enabled computer (thanks Patrick Cavanagh for informing me of this).
• Quicktime can still open image sequence, but not from GUI. Have to do it with AppleScript/Automator

tell application "Finder"

 set theFolder to input as alias

 set thePath to container of theFolder as string

 set theName to name of theFolder

 set theSequence to (get first file of theFolder as alias)

end tell

tell application "QuickTime Player 7"

activate

open image sequence theSequence

set imageSequence to thePath & theName & ":" & theName & ".mov"

tell document 1

with timeout of 500 seconds

save self contained in imageSequence

end timeout

close

end tell

end tell

• The recent versions of Quicktime (including Quicktime 7 and X) no longer play all my 2-frame movie demos correctly. When most of my movies are played with looping turned on, it only displays the first frame even though it's a two-frame movie. It does display both frames when it is not set to loop. So a decent demo can be created by making a extended replication of the two frames, even though that yields a large file size. That's what I had to do for the demos for my TiCS article. I have also tried viewing the two-frame movies in looped fashion in the following applications that play quicktime movies:
  • VLC: doesn't show both frames
  • Movist: doesn't show both frames
  • Quicktime Player 7:doesn't show both frames
  • SimpleMovieX: doesn't show both frames. Claims to allow export to image sequence, but this gives an error message. Stills are in fact created, but hiding in a subdirectory of /private/var/folders/ . I used a recursive directory listing "ls -R" to find them. Can also create movie from image sequence, via manual Edit->Copy within Preview.app and Edit->Paste in SimpleMovieX
  • Firefox: shows both frames, but has "double-vision". Shows old movies that quicktime shows as blank, but also with 'double vision'
  • MacVCD: shows both frames!
  • Google Chrome: shows both frames! Stutters slightly when loop renews. Doesn't display old movies like "difftlocatn22frps.mov". Also, displays .mov files but doesn't display the same movie if it ends in .qt