Making Movies from Models
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How does an animated SketchUp model turn into a YouTube-capable movie?
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You need to export an animation into a format that Youtube accepts. I think .avi, .wmv, .mov all work.
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...or use a screen capture like CamStudio if its like a SketchyPhysics animation.
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Oh I think I'm understanding. As in its animated using a plugin that does not make use of scenes, right? Like how would you export your airshow animation as a video format you could upload to youtube?
If that is the question, then I think you have a few options.
If you have control of every frame, you would export a jpg (or png, etc) image at each frame. Then use a software that will convert a sequence of images into a movie. I use Quicktime Pro (about $30, but it is supporting the Evil Mac empire
). But there are others that are free.If you do not have the ability to write out an image at each frame, you will need to implement a view observer that watches for each view update. Everytime the view changes, you write a jpg file to the disk. If you need to regulate framerate, you can check how long it had been sine the previous view update and only write an image once its been long enough.
Though, if you are doing animations, it will slow everything down to write images to the disk. So hopefully you have control of each frame so that the next frame does not fire until the image is completely written. Other wise you will be dropping frames.
You can check out my camera recorder script if you need an example of the camera observer method. Though I think I recall the method I used to get user paths to save files and such was really lame.
Chris
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Thanks to both!
@chris fullmer said:
Like how would you export your airshow animation as a video format you could upload to youtube?
That's it, exactly. Yes, my controller steps through one frame at a time. Is there an API method for exporting screenshots?
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Yes, that is exactly how you should do it. Export an image for each frame:
http://code.google.com/apis/sketchup/docs/ourdoc/view.html#write_image
Chris
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Thanks muchly, Chris.
Practical advice re size and compression?
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I prefer unompressed output as the codec when compiling to a movie file will compress it. If you JPEG compress the stills you'll end up double up with compression artefacts.
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