Make Video Demonstrations

This is a rough guide to making videos with your simulators.  You can export video directly from your Java application, or perform real-time screen captures using a variety of different software. The first method is the easiest and most versatile and best-suited for noninteractive animations:

• Exporting images from JOGL: You can export images from JOGL in a variety of ways. Perhaps the easiest is to simply use the com.sun.opengl.util.Screenshot class to write the current frame to disk in a suitable image format.  The ParticleSystemBuilder class already supports exporting frames to the "frames" directory, and is toggled using the 'e' key---see the FrameExporter implementation therein.
  
• Assembling images into a movie: Once you have images, you can use a video editor to convert the numbered images into a video. For example, on unix you can use the mpeg encode utilities (old link), on Windows you could use Virtual Dub to create a movie.  In addition, there are a multitude of professional ($$) applications available, such as Adobe Premiere, or Adobe After Effects, or Quicktime Pro, or iMovie, etc.
  
• Exporting a compressed movie: Once you have a video, you may need to compress it to keep the file size down (mpeg already does this), and you can use a standard video codec such as mpeg, or other popular ones such as Div-X, or Quicktime MPEG-4, or the Windows media codecs.  Most provide programs to generate the compressed movies, whereas others can rely on generic video editors (such as VirtualDub or Adobe products) to export compressed video.  Be avoid obscure and nonportable codecs, since your movies should be viewable on Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms by the staff.
  

Screen capture: Alternately, if your simulator runs at interactive rates, you can use a screen capture program to generate a video. I recommend using the prior method unless you are specifically trying to demonstrate interactive performance. Two screen capture utilities for Windows that I have used are FRAPS (for OpenGL programs), and Hypercam.  There are many new ones out there now---especially for Mac. Finally, the videos you capture are typically going to be in a vendor-specific video codec format that is not portable, therefore you will want to recompress the video in a more common format (see above) when you make your final video.

Making your final video(s): Finally, you can either submit a number of individual videos, or you can make a single compressed video that contains all of your clips. Please use meaningful names and preferrably title slides so I know what you are showing me. Include documentation if there is any ambiguity.

DLJ, Jan 2009