Andor iQ USER GUIDE

Andor iQ USER GUIDE

5.6 The Movie Editor

The Movie Editor is used to create animation sequences from frames of interest in your images, which can be saved as AVI Movies.

Images included in the animation are displayed in the list at the bottom of the dialogue.

To add an image to the list, either open it from the File Menu or Show it from the Image List.

To remove images from the list, select them with the mouse and press Delete

Selected Image.

(Information on the selected image is displayed in the top right of the dialogue, including the path, image name, animation dimension and number of frames).

There are two modes of operation:

Set Frame -

specify the parameters for each of the images in the List, as described below.

Play List

- as an AVI Movie. after setting up the parameters, play the animation before saving

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In Set Frame mode you can specify the following parameters for the selected mage:

Starting and Final Frame

Using the animation buttons or scrollbar, animate to the first frame to include and press In, then to the final frame and press Out. The frame numbers will be updated in the In and Out columns in the table.

Note: The numbers of the first and final frames of the image are displayed in the

Min and Max text boxes. The current frame is displayed in the Frame text box).

Speed of Animation

Rate specifies the number of frames to display every second. Type a value into the

text box or using the scrolling arrows, the value will be updated in the fps column.

Number of Repeats

Enter the number of times you want the image to play during the animation (type a value or use the scrolling arrows).

Animation Dimension

For multidimensional images that contain more than 3 dimensions, select the dimension along which you want to animate.

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Movie Scaling Factor

The sampling factor for the image when saved as an AVI Movie. A sampling factor of 0.5 will result in a half sized image, 0.33 a third sized image etc. Note that you

should NOT Zoom the rendered image with the Image Window Zoom tool. Use

this setting for correct Zoom in the AVI output.

Note: This is only displayed in the Saved Movie, not while animating in Play List

mode.

Increment

This specifies which frames to include in the animation. An increment of one will animate through all frames, a value of 2 will display every second frame etc.

Multi-channel

For multi-channel images, the resultant AVI movie file is saved as 24-Bit image data. If the check box remains unchecked only the first plane in the multi-channel data set is saved to disk.

Use Current Region

This option enables only image data lying within a user defined rectangular ROI to be saved as an AVI movie file.

Save Overlay

This option enables T ext and Time stamp over lays to be exported with AVI’s.

After specifying the images to include and their parameters, Play List mode lets you play the movie, using the animation buttons.

Play -

The buttons from left to right are:

Stop -

stops the animation

Jog Back - rewinds the animation 1 frame

animates through the Play List

Jog Forward - advances to the next frame

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Loop -

animates through the Play List as does the Play button, but on reaching the end of the animation it repeats, starting from the first frame

Bounce -

continually plays the animation, forwards then backwards and so forth

You can also animate through the Play List by dragging the scrollbar.

The current frame number is displayed in the Frame box.

The Play List can be saved to disk by pressing the Save List button, from where it can later be reloaded by pressing Load List.

To save the animation as an AVI Movie press Save List as Movie. You will be prompted to select a filename and path for the Movie. You will also be asked to save the Playback Frame Rate for the movie (i.e. the speed of the movie, in Frames per Second). Finally you can specify the movie compression.

The saving of AVI Movie files is illustrated in the series of screenshots shown below.

Specification of playback frame rate following selection of filename and path.

Specification of compression + decompression algorithm (aka codec) to use for movie compression.

The choice of compressor is dependent upon which codecs are installed on the system. For example, on a default Windows 2000 installation, the Cinepak, Intel

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Indeo (R3.2) and Microsoft Video 1 codecs are available. Alternatively, Full Frames can be selected, which will not compress the frames. Be aware, however, that files exported in this way could be very large and compression may offer a better size / quality payoff for portability.

The table below summarizes the main differences between these codecs.

Codec

Cinepak

Intel Indeo

Speed Size (relative to uncompressed file)

Slow

Fast

Approx. 1/10

Approx. 1/14

Quality

Good

Medium

Video 1

Fast Approx. 1/3 Good

The results will vary depending on the sequence you wish to export. Extremely detailed images with larger uniform areas will compress better than highly detailed images with small, welldefined areas. It would be beneficial to experiment with a short frame sequence using different codecs and different quality settings in order to achieve the best size / quality ratio. A suggested starting point would be the Cinepak codec with a quality of 75.

Following the specification of a frame rate and compression format, a progress bar monitors the AVI Movie Save process.

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