[R] HOW to Create Movies with R with repeated plot()?

[Earl F. Glynn]

"Jan Verbesselt" <Jan.Verbesselt at biw.kuleuven.be> wrote in message
news:000e01c59293$80ee5d00$1145210a at agr.ad10.intern.kuleuven.ac.be...
Dear R-helpers,

Is it possible to create a type of 'movie' in R based on the output of
several figures (e.g., jpegs) via the plot() function.  I obtained dynamic
results with the plotting function and would like to save these as a movie
(e.g., avi or other formats)?

1) You can create animated GIFs with the caTools package.

2) ImageMagick (clipped from R-Help)
It is quite easy to do with ImageMagick (www.imagemagick.org), which can be
installed on most OSes.  I tried this simple sequence and it worked

beautifully.



In R:



> for(i in 1:5) {

+ jpeg(paste("fig", i, ".jpg", sep = ""))

+ hist(rnorm(100))

+ dev.off()

+ }



Then from the command line (I tried it using Linux, though it should be the

same on any platform):



% convert -delay 50 -loop 50 fig*.jpg animated.gif



This created animated.gif, a nice animation of my sequence of files.  You

can control the timing of the animation by playing with -delay and -loop.



3) TCL/TK Animation (clipped from R-Help)



The tcltk package also has ways of doing this kind of stuff:



 library(tcltk)

 f <- function(){plot(rnorm(1000)); tkcmd("after", 1000,f)}

 f()



(To stop, set  f <- NULL)





efg