Skip to content

Home > User Interface > Results Processing > Overview > Animation Player > Generating AVI Video Files

Generating AVI animation files

You may create Windows .AVI animation files directly from the Animation player. These .AVI files may be included in your presentations. Once your simulation has run and you have opened the corresponding Simulation results file, access the Animation player, select which part of the analysis you want to make an animation on (static or dynamic), and finally click the Generate animation file button:

The following dialog displays :

Select whether you want to create the .AVI file with all the frames, or select the first and last frames that will bound your animation. (This is preferable to limit the size of the .AVI file that will be generated.)

  • Select the frame rate: this will define how many frames per second will display.

  • Frame step: setting the frame step to one means that all the selected frames will be included in your file. Most of the time, this leads to very large number of frames and thereby large .AVI files. Using larger frame steps causes the AVI recording to skip a number of frames when creating the animation file, for instance if the frame step equals 2, one frame out of two will be included in the file.

  • File: the name your .AVI file will be given. If a previous file exists, it will be presented - be sure to change the filename to avoid over-writing it. You may also browse for another existing file in case you want to replace it, by pressing the '...' button on the right of this edit box.

Press OK to validate your settings. Another dialog box displays from which you can define which compression rate related encoding system will be used. Once you have selected this, pressing OK will actually generate the .AVI file.

Note

the quality of the .AVI animation file strongly depends on the compression rate you have chosen and also on your hardware. Though the size of uncompressed files is usually very large, they can be very efficiently compressed by using dedicated tools such as WinZip, while keeping a high level of quality.