R devel - Aug 2007 - SWF animation method

Hi all,

Just thought I'd share something I discovered last night. I was  
interested in creating animations consisting of a series of plots and  
after finding very little in the usual sources regarding animation in  
R directly, and disliking the imagemagick method described here 
(http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/help/05/10/13297.html), I  
discovered that if one exports the plots to a multipage pdf, it is  
relatively trivial to then use the pdf2swf command in SWFTools  
(http://www.swftools.org/download.html; mac install instructions  
here: http://9mmedia.com/blog/?p=7).

pdf2swf seems to generate swf animations with a slow frame rate, but  
you can increase the framerate using 'swfcombine -r 30 --dummy  
myslow.swf -o myfast.swf', where the value passed to -r is the  
framerate.

Unfortunately, this method seems to have limitations with regards to  
the number of plots it can convert. For example, on my system (17"  
macbook pro, 2.33GHz, 2GB ram, OSX 10.4.10, R 2.5.1) the maximum  
number of single point plots I can do is about 5400 (i.e. for(i in  
1:5400) plot(runif(1),ylim=c(0,1)) ). Complexity of the plots might  
matter as well, but I only have rather convoluted examples of this.  
Also, pdf2swf throws up a lot of errors ('ERROR   Internal error:  
drawChar.render!=beginString.render'), the origin of which I know  
not, that might be slowing things down.

Now, if only someone could wrap this process into a single R command  
(I'm a little too newb to do this myself I think).

Mike

--
Mike Lawrence
Graduate Student, Department of Psychology, Dalhousie University

Website: http://memetic.ca

Public calendar: http://icalx.com/public/informavore/Public

"The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain and simple to express:
Err and err and err again, but less and less and less."
	- Piet Hein

I suppose what is really wanted is a way to associate a the parts of a
graph with a timeline a la gapminder.

Cheers,
Bryan Rasmussen

On 8/8/07, Mike Lawrence <Mike.Lawrence at dal.ca>
wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Just thought I'd share something I discovered last night. I was
> interested in creating animations consisting of a series of plots and
> after finding very little in the usual sources regarding animation in
> R directly, and disliking the imagemagick method described here
> (http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/help/05/10/13297.html), I
> discovered that if one exports the plots to a multipage pdf, it is
> relatively trivial to then use the pdf2swf command in SWFTools
> (http://www.swftools.org/download.html; mac install instructions
> here: http://9mmedia.com/blog/?p=7).
>
> pdf2swf seems to generate swf animations with a slow frame rate, but
> you can increase the framerate using 'swfcombine -r 30 --dummy
> myslow.swf -o myfast.swf', where the value passed to -r is the
> framerate.
>
> Unfortunately, this method seems to have limitations with regards to
> the number of plots it can convert. For example, on my system (17"
> macbook pro, 2.33GHz, 2GB ram, OSX 10.4.10, R 2.5.1) the maximum
> number of single point plots I can do is about 5400 (i.e. for(i in
> 1:5400) plot(runif(1),ylim=c(0,1)) ). Complexity of the plots might
> matter as well, but I only have rather convoluted examples of this.
> Also, pdf2swf throws up a lot of errors ('ERROR   Internal error:
> drawChar.render!=beginString.render'), the origin of which I know
> not, that might be slowing things down.
>
> Now, if only someone could wrap this process into a single R command
> (I'm a little too newb to do this myself I think).
>
> Mike
>
> --
> Mike Lawrence
> Graduate Student, Department of Psychology, Dalhousie University
>
> Website: http://memetic.ca
>
> Public calendar: http://icalx.com/public/informavore/Public
>
> "The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain and simple to express:
> Err and err and err again, but less and less and less."
>         - Piet Hein
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>

On 08-Aug-07 13:52:59, Mike Lawrence wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Just thought I'd share something I discovered last night. I was  
> interested in creating animations consisting of a series of plots and  
> after finding very little in the usual sources regarding animation in  
> R directly, and disliking the imagemagick method described here 
> (http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/help/05/10/13297.html), I  
> discovered that if one exports the plots to a multipage pdf, it is  
> relatively trivial to then use the pdf2swf command in SWFTools  
> (http://www.swftools.org/download.html; mac install instructions  
> here: http://9mmedia.com/blog/?p=7).
Thanks so much for sharing your discovery, Mike! Out of the blue!
(Unexpected bonus for being on the R list).

Best wishes,
Ted.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk>
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861
Date: 08-Aug-07                                       Time: 15:25:44
------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

Hello Mike,

You might want to give "mencoder" a try. It usually comes with
mplayer.
I did play with it a while ago and was fairly happy with the results.
Basically, the idea was to create many jpg files somewhere, which is not 
too hard using the %03d substitution described in ?jpeg.
The rest is described here: 
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/menc-feat-enc-images.html

Cheers,

Romain

PS: You might find some links in this (not really maintained) webpage: 
http://addictedtor.free.fr/movies/

Mike Lawrence wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Just thought I'd share something I discovered last night. I was 
> interested in creating animations consisting of a series of plots and 
> after finding very little in the usual sources regarding animation in 
> R directly, and disliking the imagemagick method described 
> here(http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/help/05/10/13297.html), I 
> discovered that if one exports the plots to a multipage pdf, it is 
> relatively trivial to then use the pdf2swf command in SWFTools 
> (http://www.swftools.org/download.html; mac install instructions here: 
> http://9mmedia.com/blog/?p=7).
>
> pdf2swf seems to generate swf animations with a slow frame rate, but 
> you can increase the framerate using 'swfcombine -r 30 --dummy 
> myslow.swf -o myfast.swf', where the value passed to -r is the
framerate.
>
> Unfortunately, this method seems to have limitations with regards to 
> the number of plots it can convert. For example, on my system (17" 
> macbook pro, 2.33GHz, 2GB ram, OSX 10.4.10, R 2.5.1) the maximum 
> number of single point plots I can do is about 5400 (i.e. for(i in 
> 1:5400) plot(runif(1),ylim=c(0,1)) ). Complexity of the plots might 
> matter as well, but I only have rather convoluted examples of this. 
> Also, pdf2swf throws up a lot of errors ('ERROR   Internal error: 
> drawChar.render!=beginString.render'), the origin of which I know not, 
> that might be slowing things down.
>
> Now, if only someone could wrap this process into a single R command 
> (I'm a little too newb to do this myself I think).
>
> Mike
>
> -- 
> Mike Lawrence
> Graduate Student, Department of Psychology, Dalhousie University
>
> Website: http://memetic.ca
>
> Public calendar: http://icalx.com/public/informavore/Public
>
> "The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain and simple to express:
> Err and err and err again, but less and less and less."
>     - Piet Hein
>
>
>

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