Press the movie button {bmct help0075.bmp} to open this dialog.
Note that the boxes in the version 2 (MAXaax.EXE) of this dialog are rearranged and that an additional set of boxes is present where a movie command can be entered, checked, and processed:
To generate a movie, you need to define the movie directives in the Info and movie directives dialog. Moreover, you need to specify the number of cycles for the outer and inner movie loop and the number of frames per second that will be displayed when you run a movie with an AVI player. The Movie dialog allows you to specify this data, and to run each movie directive separately.
Movie loops
MaX-1 provides 2 nested loops for computing movies. You can set the number of cycles for the Outer loop and the Inner loop in the corresponding boxes. Note that the number of AVI frames obtained is not necessarily equal to the product of these two numbers. You can even run the movie generator without generating an AVI movie at all. This is useful for computing complex processes, to preparing data to be displayed in a subsequent project, etc.
AVI frames
MaX-1 generates AVI movies, except when the corresponding directives are missing in the list of movie directives. The header of an AVI file contains some information about the movie that is used by the AVI player. Most important is the number of frames per second to be displayed by the player. You can specify this number in the AVI frames/second box.
Editing AVI files - Microsoft VidEdit
Unfortunately, the optimum number of frames per second depends on the contents of the animation, the size of the frames, the speed of the device where the AVI file is stored, and on many other things. Therefore, you may want to specify the number of frames per second when you watch the movie and not when you generate it. Note that you can do this, for example, with Microsoft's VidEdit. This tool is available for free on the World Wide Web. It also contains compression utilities that allow you to save memory, which is important because movies can be extremely memory consuming.
Selecting a directive
Use the little scroll bar for selecting a directive to check or run. The directive will be displayed to the right and its number to the left of the scroll bar.
Check button
When you press the Check button, MaX-1 will perform some simple checks on the syntax of the directive displayed in the corresponding box. If an error is detected, a warning will be displayed. Moreover, the number of the directive will be increased by one.
Run button
Instead of just checking the syntax, you can also ask MaX-1 to Run the command specified by the current directive. This allows you to verify whether a directive does what you expect it to do.
Generate movie !! button
The Run button runs only a single command, whereas Generate movie !! runs all the commands and also the movie loops. Note that the exclamation marks on the button indicate that the dialog will close as soon as you press it.
Read Movie data
Press the Read… button to read movie data from a file. A file name dialog will allow you to select a file to read from.
Write Movie data
Press the Write… button to write movie data to a file. A file name dialog will allow you to select the file to write to.
Close the dialog
Press the Close button to close the dialog. Note that the data in the dialog becomes effective once the dialog is closed.