Graphics: you’re doing it wrong.

November 1, 2010 at 6:19 pm (doing it wrong, lying documentation, powerfully stupid graphics)

GETFRAME returns a movie frame. The frame is a snapshot
    of the current axis.

No it bloody well isn’t. GETFRAME (as least on OS X) captures a snapshot of the portion of the display screen that might or might or might not have the current axis on top. If you have a long-running script to produce an animation, you might be tempted to switch over to read email or a PDF while your animation renders. In which case, when all is finished, you’ll find yourself a nice AVI file full of your email and none of your calculations. You want to render animations using GETFRAME, better have a single task computer to dedicate to it, and make sure to turn off the screen saver. What is this, 1992?

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4 Comments

  1. ytterbium said,

    Indeed. Sometimes the environment can behave in such illogical or primitive ways, compared to the complexity of the whole system. Probably they invented the “why” function for such situations.

  2. thomathom said,

    I’ve had luck by creating the figure with hf = figure(‘visible’, ‘off’). Then, I used addframe(aviobj, hf). No e-mail movies. This was on Linux.

  3. Alex (@shortlex) said,

    Had this problem working on my undergrad thesis. It was 18 hours into my model run before I realized the problem. *facepalm*

  4. Matt said,

    Ha! This is pathetic.

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