Exporting to video

headers Yiannis Belias | 2 Feb 11:46

Hi all,
  Just FYI. Yesterday I made a video simulation[0] of the upcoming lunar occultation of pleiades
for my local astronomy club. So I used ktars and I'd like to share a few things with you.

1. I used the script builder for start, but I found out I would have to use a more "spiced up"
shell script[attatched] for this job. (To tell the truth, I was expecting something more javascript like...)
2. I had to use for loops with explicit dates to increase the time interval. It would be much
better if I could just step forward for a specified time step.
3. I found out that when the kstars window was smaller than the capture window, the output
frames were blank[white] at that region. (Don't scratch your heads - *netbook* :) )
4. The whole process of creating about 1000 frames is really slow.
5. I didn't find a way to display the time/date info from within kstars, so I used the convert
utility from imagemagick.
6. The stars motion as you can see on the video is a bit "funky" :) I had antialiasing
switched off though.

I don't know if kstars was made with exporting videos in mind, but it actually worked!
So, thank's for a great program :)

Cheers!
Yiannis

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjsxu1bSbXE

--
Yiannis Belias  <jonnyb <at> hol.gr>                    `
Homepage [http://users.hol.gr/~jonnyb/video] '              .
GNU+LINUX:                                            '           '
IN A WORLD WITHOUT FENCES WHO NEEDS GATES?      .                     *