Adding Movie Frames

Movies are created by saving a series of images of the cave into memory. Once the images are saved to memory, each image can be instantly displayed on the screen. By rapidly playing back a sequence of images, you get a motion picture of your travels around and through the cave.

Capturing Images. The process of creating a movie is easy. You begin by finding a starting view for the movie. Just zoom, pan or rotate the cave until you have a good starting position. You then click-on the "Add Frame" button. This will save the first image to memory. Now, you repeatedly zoom, pan and rotate, and save each new image. Generally, you want to make small changes between each image. Otherwise, the movie will be jerky.

Frame Delays. When you add a frame to a movie, the program plots the image into memory instead of onto the screen. If the cave is large, the process can take several seconds. The "Hour Glass" cursor will stay on the screen until the process is complete. You cannot abort the frame creation process with the mouse button like you can other plotting processes. This is because if the process is interrupted, the movie frame will be incomplete. As you add new frames to your movie, the program will count the frames and display them in the "Used Frames" display box.

Frame Memory. The program allocates memory for the movie one frame at a time. The total number of frames available for your movie is dependent on the amount of free memory available on your system. This means that the number will vary depending upon how many other programs are running and how Windows is configured. The maximum number of free frames is displayed in the "Free Frames" display box. The number of free frames is a function of the amount of memory on your system and the version of Windows you are running.