Creating a Movie from a Series of Plots in R [closed]

Here is one method I found using R help:

To create the individual image frames:

jpeg("/tmp/foo%02d.jpg")
for (i in 1:5) {
  my.plot(i)
}
dev.off()

To make the movie, first install ImageMagick. Then call the following function (which calls "convert", part of ImageMagick I suppose):

make.mov <- function(){
     unlink("plot.mpg")
     system("convert -delay 0.5 plot*.jpg plot.mpg")
}

Or try using the ffmpeg function as described in this article (I've found this gives cleaner results): ffmpeg -r 25 -qscale 2 -i tmp/foo%02d.jpg output.mp4

May require a bit of tinkering, but this seemed pretty simple once everything was installed.

Of course, anywhere you see "jpg" or "jpeg", you can substitute GIF or PNG to suit your fancy.

Take a look at either the animation package created by Yihui Xie or the EBImage bioconductor package (?animate).

I think you can do this also with the write.gif function in the caTools library. You'd have to get your graph into a multi-frame image first. I'm not sure how to do that. Anyone? Bueller?

The classic example of an animated GIF is this code which I didn't write but I did blog about some time ago:

library(fields) # for tim.colors
library(caTools) # for write.gif
m = 400 # grid size
C = complex( real=rep(seq(-1.8,0.6, length.out=m), each=m ), imag=rep(seq(-1.2,1.2, length.out=m), m ) )
C = matrix(C,m,m)

Z = 0
X = array(0, c(m,m,20))
for (k in 1:20) {
Z = Z^2+C
X[,,k] = exp(-abs(Z))
}

image(X[,,k], col=tim.colors(256)) # show final image in R
write.gif(X, 'Mandelbrot.gif', col=tim.colors(256), delay=100)

Code credit goes to Jarek Tuszynski, PhD.