Making Movies

 

The Movie tool can be used to make spectacular movies of any Starry Night view. Movies are played back using the QuickTime viewer, so you can send Starry Night movies to your friends and colleagues. They need not have Starry Night.

Starry Night's Movie tool lets you record a graphically intensive event (such as a planet flyby) and play it back as a smooth QuickTime sequence.

To make a movie, select the Movie tool from the Tool Palette. Drag the tool over the area of a Starry Night window that you wish to make a movie of. As you drag, a selection rectangle is formed, which we call the Movie Box. During this process, the pixel length of the sides is displayed, which is useful if you are designing your movie to fit into a predetermined area. (Note: The minimum size for a Movie Box is 101 pixels by 81 pixels).

Once you have sized your movie, release the mouse button. A dialog box will appear asking what you would like to title the movie, and where you would like to save it.


Movie controls

After you have named and saved the movie, the Movie Box's controls appear. There are three Movie controls: the Pause button, the Stop button, and the Record button.

The Pause button pauses the recording of the movie. This enables you to adjust any time or location information between frames.

The Stop button completes the recording process, and closes the QuickTime window.

The Record button resumes the recording of a movie after it has been paused.

You can also use the time buttons on the Time Palette to stop and start the movie. If time is running, the Movie Box will begin recording movement immediately. If you'd like to tweak the view a bit, you can turn Time off first (using the Time Palette) before using the Movie tool's Pause button. You can then zoom, scroll, or grab your way to the perfect shot before clicking on the Record button to start your recording.

  • Note: The Movie Box doesn't record cursors, so you don't have to worry about getting a "hand" in the shot.

When in Recording Mode, the Movie Box records a frame every time the Starry Night window is updated. This means that if your time step is set at 3 seconds, every time Starry Night moves time ahead 3 seconds, one frame is recorded. This frame information is displayed in the right-hand corner of the Movie box's controls. In addition, the total running time of the movie is also displayed. In the above example, a total of 50 frames have been recorded, and at the default setting of 10 frames per second, the movie is currently 5 seconds long.

Starry Night also updates its windows if you are using the Grabber tool or the scroll tools, so these movements will become incorporated into your movies. You can also use the Pause button to animate these movements. Click on the button to pause the recording of a movie, scroll the view a little, then continue recording by running time a step or two. By repeating this a number of times, you can create fantastic three-dimensional animations.

  • Tip: Turn on Onscreen info from the Guides menu when making a movie if you want to show a running log of location, view direction, or time.
  • Note: A movie can quickly take up a lot of space on your hard drive, so don't leave it running too long.


Adjusting Recording Settings

By double clicking on the Movie tool, you can adjust several aspects of the recording settings. Changing these setting will affect the size or quality of your movies.

Compressor -- This popup lets you choose one of several different compression formats. Depending on the compression format chosen, a second popup menu may allow you to choose from several color options.

Quality -- The slider lets you adjust the quality of the recording.

Motion -- Within this box you can adjust frames per second, key frames, and limit data rates.


Playing Back Your QuickTime movies

You can use any QuickTime movie player to play back and/or edit your movies, such as MoviePlayer. To play back a movie double click on it's icon in the folder where it was saved.


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Page last modified on: January 25, 1999