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PhilipOakley1-Visitor
1-Visitor
Oct 27, 2014 10:22 PM UTC
Question

Automating long running animations

I often use animations (essentially a For loop on the built in variable FRAME) to generate multi-pont analyses, including screen snapshots as an AVI..

One issue is that when the analysis takes a very long time, with a need to save the avi at the end, and to take care that data files are not overwritten when the loop finishes (usually with a fresh auto-calc back at FRAME 0).

Has anyone managed to automatically detect the completion of the animation recording, so that the AVI can be saved using some separate piece of automation?

Also has anyone, in a similar manner, managed to automate the backup of data files generated during the animation recording.

Some of my data generations take 5 - 8 hrs and are almost the 1000 FRAME (current) limit, so if anything goes wrong its a whole day wasted.

Philip

5 replies

StuartBruff23-Emerald V
23-Emerald V
Oct 27, 2014 10:38 PM UTC

If you're using M15, Philip, could you use a component that takes FRAME as an input and then use a script to save / backup files? Not sure how well it would synchronise, though.

Stuart

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PhilipOakley1-VisitorAuthor
1-Visitor
Oct 27, 2014 10:54 PM UTC

Hi Stuart, yes it's V15 M030.

While it's possible to kind of do the auto data backup as you said, the more difficult problem is the saving of the avi, for which the option isn't presented until its all completed. The AVI is all that management want to see sometimes 😉

Philip

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StuartBruff23-Emerald V
23-Emerald V
Oct 28, 2014 7:14 AM UTC

Is there any reason why you can't break the run up into, say, batches of 50 or 100 and then merge the avi files into one upon completion?

To prevent overwrite, could you tag each file with the time as well as frame number, or do a file existence check from a component?

Stuart

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