Image and Movie Capture

6.9 Image and Movie Capture

You can capture the main 3D view as an image, a QuickTime movie or an animated GIF.

6.9.0	Saving Images
6.9.1	Print Current View
6.9.2	Save QuickTime Movies
6.9.3	Play QuickTime Movies

6.9.0 Saving Images

You can save a display as an image. Select the menu item. A file dialog will popup where you can enter a file name for the image file. The IDV supports JPEG, PNG and GIF formats. From this File Dialog you can also specify the image quality (only used for JPEG's and what to capture.

Note: when capturing a image the screen cannot be obscured.

The IDV can also write out an image and the corresponding Google Earth KML or KMZ file. For this to be correct the projection must be a Lat/Lon geographic projection (i.e., rectilinear) and in an overhead view. The simplest way to get a correct projection is to select the Projections->Set Current View as Projection menu item. If you specify a .kml file the IDV will generate an image with the same file prefix and the kml file that refers to the image. If you specify a .kmz file the IDV this file (which is a zip format) will contain the image and the kml file.

6.9.1 Print Current View

You can send any display to a printer. Select the menu item. A Print dialog will popup where you can configure and print an image.

6.9.2 Save QuickTime Movies

You can save any sequence of displays as a QuickTime movie. Select the menu item to bring up the "Image capture" window:

To make a QuickTime movie or animated GIF there are three steps: capturing the frames, previewing the frames, and creating the movie.

To capture frames, in the Capture section of the "Image capture" window, do one of the following three choices:

click on the Capture one image button to make a single frame of the current IDV display. Then you change the display to exactly what you want in the next frame, capture that new image, and continue through the movie.
Click on Capture animation to automatically capture all frames in a display time sequence which you can animate with the usual IDV Time Animation Controls. Check Reset to start time to ensure that you capture the entire animation sequence. The QuickTime animation capture starts on the first frame visible in the IDV and goes to the end. So you can use this to capture part of a sequence.
Click on Capture automatically to start taking snapshots of frames from the IDV display while you make changes, such as while you change the viewpoint by zooming, rotation, and panning, and combinations of all three. To stop the automatic snapshots, click on the button again (which now says Stop). You can set the automatic snapshot sampling rate with the Rate field.

You can combine these different methods of capture. The list of frames is additive.

If you want to save the individual intermediate files that are used to create the movie, select Save files to button and specify a directory and file name format. Otherwise, the intermediate files will be saved in a temporary directory and will be removed.

You can Preview the movie and remove individual frames or Delete All the frames.

When done capturing frames select the Save movie button to specify the Quicktime movie file (.mov) or the animated GIF file (.gif).

6.9.3 Play QuickTime Movies

The IDV supports displaying certain types of Quicktime movies (including the ones the IDV generates). Just load in the Quicktime movie from the File Data Chooser.

Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer > Tools