Creating a movie requires two steps:

1) designate an output file with SET MOVIE

2) generate a sequence of frames with REPEAT and FRAME

See commands SET MOVIE, CANCEL MOVIE, SHOW MOVIE, FRAME, and REPEAT in the Commands Reference section of this manual.

Example: basic movie

yes? SET DATA coads_climatology !specify data set
yes? SET REGION/@W !specify Pacific Ocean
yes? LET/TITLE="SST Anomaly" SST_ANOM = SST - SST[L=1:12@AVE]
yes? REPEAT/L=1:12 (FILL sst_anom; FRAME/FILE=my_movie.mgm)
!filled contour of sea surface\
temp anomaly captured and\
written to HDF file

Optionally, ".mgm" will be assigned to the movie file.

REPEAT executes its argument (in the above example, FILL) successively for each timestep specified. REPEAT can have multiple arguments separated by semi-colons and enclosed in parentheses.

FRAME is a stand-alone command, but also a qualifier for the graphical output commands PLOT, CONTOUR, FILL (alias for CONTOUR/FILL), SHADE, VECTOR and WIRE.

The saved animation frames are exactly the size and shape of the window from which they are created. Thus a large window results in a larger, slower animation that demands more disk space and memory to play back. The SET WINDOW/SIZE= command is generally used to specify minimally acceptable frame size.

See section "Advanced Movie-making", for more examples.

Note that when making an HDF movie you should not start Ferret with the -unmapped option.