Image Movie Control

This window allows you to control the starting and ending coordinates within which a movie will run, the increment between successive frames, and the frame rate. There are also controls for automatically taking snapshots through the range of movie, and for taking a high-resolution (montaged) snapshot of the Zap window.

Use the axis radio buttons to select whether the sliders will adjust the start, end, and increment for X, Y, Z or Time. The initial default setting is for the sliders to adjust movies in Z.

The start and end values for Time have another function not related to movies: they provide the limits for changing time with the "!" and "@" hot keys. This allows you to use these keys to toggle between two selected times, not just the first and last time.

The Reset button will reset the start, end, and increment to their initial settings (the minimum and maximum coordinates and an increment of 1) for all four axes.

The Done button will close the window and reset these values in the same way.

The Rate text box will display the current frame rate as it is changed by the down and up Arrows or by "," and "." and will also allow you to enter a custom value. You must type Enter to have your value take effect.

The next line shows two actual frame rates, the first averaged over the time since the current movie was started, the second an instantaneous rate since the last frame was displayed. The actual rate will be less than the selected rate if the display is too slow to keep up, and can also differ from the selected rate due to lack of precision of the system clock.

If Round Trip is selected, then movies will loop from one end to the other then from that end back to the start; if One Way is selected, then movies will always go in one direction and jump back to the start when the end is reached.

If one of the Snapshot buttons, TIFF or one of the two non-TIFF buttons, is selected, and a movie is started in a Zap or Slicer window, then that window will automatically take a snapshot of each frame in the given format for one complete cycle of the movie. The default non-TIFF formats should be JPEG and PNG. To change the format of the first non-TIFF option, use the menu entry Edit-Options and go to the Behavior panel. The second option will be PNG if the first one is not PNG, or JPEG if the first one is PNG.

If you stop the movie before it is done, then another mouse click in that or a different window will start a completely new movie.

If Zap montage by is selected, then a TIFF snapshot of a Zap window (via Ctrl-S) will be taken as a montage of frames at a higher zoom, as selected by the spin box. The montage is assembled in memory and saved as a single TIFF image. In addition, if you start a movie in the Zap window when one of the Snapshot buttons is on, a montage will be taken at each section in the movie range and saved as a TIFF image, regardless of which snapshot type is selected. In this way, you can get a snapshot bigger than the size of the screen. You may need to set the thickness of model lines so that they will display appropriately at the higher zoom, and you need to turn on high-resolution display in the Zap window to get an interpolated image. Just the area of the image showing in the Zap window will be captured. The rubberband must be off, otherwise an ordinary snaphot of the enclosed subarea will be taken. On some machines you may need to make sure that there are no other windows on top of the Zap windows.

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