[R] Playing with rgl: a Youtube video

[Paul Smith]

On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 12:42 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
> I've just posted a demo made with the rgl package to Youtube, visible here:
>  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prdZWQD7L5c
>
> For future reference, here are the steps I used:
>
> 1.  Design a shape to be displayed, and then play with the animation
> functions to make it change over time.  Use play3d to do it live in R,
> movie3d to write the individual frames of the movie to .png files.
>
> 2.  Use the ffmpeg package (not an R package, a separate project at
> http://ffmpeg.org) to convert the .png files to an .mp4 file.  The
> individual frames totalled about 1 GB; the compressed movie is about 45 MB.
> 3.  Upload to Youtube.  I'm not a musician, so I had to use one of their
> licensed background tracks, I couldn't write my own.  I spent a lot of time
> picking one and then adjusting the timing of the video to compensate.  Each
> render/upload cycle at full resolution took about an hour and a half.  It's
> a lot faster to render in a smaller window with fewer frames per second, but
> it's still tedious.   It's easier to synchronize if you actually have a copy
> of the music locally, but Youtube doesn't let you download their music.  So
> the timing isn't perfect, but it's good enough for me!

Very nice video, Duncan!

Paul