Creating Animated Sequences

With Dragonfly's Movie Maker, you create animated sequences by adding key frames to the timeline that define camera effects such as zooms, pans, and rotations, as well as other property transitions, such as window leveling, clipping, and opacity. The timing of transitions between key frames can be adjusted on the timeline and the gaps between key frames, or control points, will be interpolated to result in a smooth animation.

Animated sequences may also contain any number of objects — such as image data, regions of interest, multi-ROIs, and meshes — and can be exported as video files or frame sequences. You can also add text and image overlays to tell a more informative story.

1. Import or create all the objects that you plan to include in your animated sequence, recommended.

   You can also add text and image overlays to tell a more informative story (see Image and Text Overlays).

2. Add the objects that you want to appear at the beginning of the animated sequence to a 3D view in the workspace and then adjust the 3D view as required.
3. Right-click inside the 3D view and then choose Show Movie Maker in the pop-up menu.

   The Movie Maker panel appears in the selected 3D view and a key frame representing the current state of the view is added to the timeline automatically.

   

   Note See Movie Maker Interface for more information about the panel.

4. Do the following if you need to change the default duration of the animation:
   • Click the Animation Settings button on the top left of the Movie Maker panel.
   • Select the required duration in the Animation Settings dialog and then click the OK button.

   Note You can also change the animation settings while you work. For example, if you need to add additional time or shorten an animated sequence.

5. Prepare the next key frame.

   You can work with camera effects such as zooms and pans, as well as other property transitions, such as window leveling, clipping, and opacity. You can also add objects to the view to tell a more informative story.

6. Do one of the following:
   • Click the Add Key button on the Movie Maker panel.
   • Right-click the timeline or 3D view and then choose Add snapshot key frame in the pop-up menu.
   • You can also add key frames at regular intervals by pressing the configured shortcut key for adding a key frame (see Configured Actions for the Movie Maker).

     Note You can add a rotation to a key frame to show all sides of an object (see Adding Rotations) or an interpolation function to highlight the beginning or end of a transition (see Interpolating Camera Transitions). A number of scripted effects, such as clip sweeps, are also available (see Adding Clip Sweeps).

7. Add key frames until the animated sequence is complete.

   

8. Preview the animated sequence with the playback controls or by dragging the Seek bar (see Playback Controls).
9. If required, edit the animated sequence (see Editing Animated Sequences).
10. Export the animated sequence (see Exporting Animated Sequences).