Rotation or Vibration Movie
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Dialog Box - called from: Rotation Menu, Vibrational Modes dialog, Thermal Motion dialog.

This will write a movie or video file in .AVI (Windows), .MOV (Macintosh) or .SWF - Flash (all platforms) format. These files consist of a series of bitmap (raster) images.

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Rotation. The structure will be rotated from its current attitude about the selected Axis, with the selected Rotation increment, until the sum of rotations exceeds the Maximum rotation.

Vibration. One vibrational cycle is written - normally this should be displayed as a loop, or in continuous mode. The Seconds per cycle determines the duration of the loop, and therefore the total number of frames.

Thermal Motion. The complete range of temperatures will be recorded.
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A normal motion picture uses 30 Frames per second, but typical computer videos use less than this. In fact, some computers may not be able to handle 30 frames/sec for large images. 15 frames/sec may be adequate

For .SWF - Flash files (only) you can add a sound track from a .mp3 file.

Note that movie files may be very large (many megabytes) even if compressed. For Macintosh, the compression mode is automatically selected by the System software, and is supposedly optimal for the resolution (Pixel size) selected. In Windows, you are presented with a dialog showing the available codecs (COmpression-DECompression algorithms), and you must select one. Finding the optimal codec may be a matter of trial and error - performance usually varies with the Pixel size and the actual number of colors used. Some codecs compress very effectively, but cause degradation of the image - ATOMS images should usually be compressed with a lossless compression method. Some codecs which have been found to be good for typical ATOMS images are the CorePNG and Lagarath codecs. These and other codecs can be downloaded on the WWWeb (Internet).

See Frames for details of the frame and frame units.