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Making Movies Function - export to video clip

V7 SNP appears to be missing an extremely useful feature that V6 has, it is called making movies:

Here's how it works:-

V6...Making Movies.

You can make spectacular movies using Starry Night. You can record a graphically intensive event (such as a planet flyby) and play it back as a smooth animated sequence. Movies are played back using the QuickTime viewer, so you can send them to your friends and colleagues. They need not have Starry Night to view the movies. To make a movie, choose File->Make Movie. A dialog box will open that allows you to name your movie file and choose where to save it. The first time that you make a movie, the Compression Settings dialog box will also open. See “Movie Compression Settings” on page 153 to learn the meaning of the options in this dialog box. After you have named your file, a rectangle appears on the centre of the screen, which we call the Movie Box. Tip (Pro and Pro Plus only): You can change the size of the movie box (height or width) by choosing Preferences from the File menu (Windows) or the Starry Night menu (Macintosh). and selecting QuickTime from the dropbox on the upper left of the Preferences dialog box.

 

This V6 Feature is an excdellent teaching tool, I believe that it should be re-instated

 

Date Votes

8 comments

  • Avatar
    Keiron Smith Official comment

    Yes, it's a good idea. We'll review this for V8.

    Thanks!

  • 0
    Avatar
    Seth Jarvis

    This is a HUGE issue.  I am a planetarium/astronomy educator, and I _depend_ on being able to make QT movies with Starry Night.  If it is true that this feature is no longer supported in SNP7 then there's absolutely no reason for me to have purchased it and I need a refund.  Please respond ASAP.  Thank you, Seth Jarvis, Director, Clark Planetarium, Salt Lake City, UT

  • 0
    Avatar
    Tom Milligan

    I found this feature in v7 in the File->Export Sky View->As Movie.. menu pick.  

    However, while exporting the movie, the activity on the screen is choppy, which is OK as long as the resulting movie is smooth.  However, playing back the resulting movie is not smooth, it is choppy too.

    Any recommendations?

    Thanks,

    TM

  • 0
    Avatar
    Desmond Martynick

    Well it has been a while since anyone has posted to this thread. For those having issues with the built in export to video or not preforming well. Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) is a good solution with many features that are very useful in many ways. I use it for content creation and seldom have any issues with it. Once you get it figured out and a little Goggling you'd be good to go. As for the stuttering and lagged video playback well that sounds like hardware related issues (CPU/GPU/RAM).

     

  • 0
    Avatar
    Tom Milligan

    I have a hard time believing that the poor video performance is related to CPU/GPU/RAM since I can launch Camtasia and record the SNP screen without any performance issue and the resulting movie plays back just fine.

  • 0
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    Desmond Martynick

    TM, I understand where you are coming from in regards to this issue. But I was being very generic in my post mainly due to the vast majority of system configurations out there in the wild. Be it Mac's (any variant) or PC's. I was just trying to help with an issue. For me I do not have the issue with the built in system for video export, but it is limited to 25 FPS, with no option to set it either to 480p/720p/1080p. 

    Since I don't know what your setup is, I really cannot tell whats going on. It could be a number of things ranging in from BIOS/EFI config's(IRQ conflicts), bad driver release, software conflict's, to failing hardware. Or SN7's export feature just might not be optimized properly. 

    Now keep in mind that SN6/7 is 32bit software so it will be limited to approx 4GB of memory and address space.I think that this is where the issue can be pin pointed to, at least my theory. Why? Because it is sharing the total amount of memory allocated to the main software executable.

    I think this is the cause for most of the issues. There are other work around's, but just to complex to get into it here and will defeat the purpose of this post.I bet the dev team took this into account as well. But hardware still come into the equation here. 

    Not trying to be rude here, but for others here that are not proficient in computing:

    Depending on the GPU if you are Using an Nvidia solution, if it is a lower end card, like below the GTX650/750/Ti (desktop) or (pro/ws) Quadro K5/6 series with a 128 bit bus and 2GB or under GDDR4 VRAM you'll end up with issues especially if your system RAM is 4GB and less.

    Couple that with a CPU that is clocked under 3 Ghz per a core. Processing the video will be an issue since there are too many bottlenecks to run the 3D application while trying to capture what is being rendered and encoding it to a container (IE: AVI/MP4/MP2... etc..).

    The end result is a stuttering / lagged video.

  • 0
    Avatar
    Alina Melnykova

    Hello

    Can anyone help me to find out how to record date/time in the movie? I can export data file as movie, no problem but there is not date/time appear on the screen. it would be wonderful to have this feature.

    Any thoughts?

    Thanks

     

  • 0
    Avatar
    Melnikova Alina

    Hi Keiron.

     

    I've upgraded from V7 Pro Plus to V8 Pro Plus with expectation that date/time info option is be added in V8.

    Unfortunately, there is no option to see date/time in movie export. 

    Can you please let me know if this functionality can be added to V8? perhaps with the next major update to V8?

    thanks

    A

     

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