use VAPOR produce animation automatically

Hi Jiang. Currently, all video animations that come from Vapor are generated by the "Capture Image Sequence" feature that generates a set of image files. Capturing an image sequence from a command-line entry is not supported, but it's an interesting idea that does make sense. If it's any help, ffmpeg (link below) is a tool that can optimally generate animations from the command line. Of course, we can only use it once Vapor has generated an image sequence of our data. Here is an example of a command I would use to convert a set of images named testImages****.jpg into an .avi file (this all being run from our local directory). ffmpeg -i testImages%04d.jpg -r 25 -b 4096k -f mov -pix_fmt yuv420p test.avi I hope that helps. I also think that this is a good idea for a future feature. -Scott https://www.ffmpeg.org/

Yes, I think this is a great idea. It would be useful for automated weather forecasts to highlight different layers of the atmosphere. If Vapor could read a Python script going through the motions of creating a 3D plot, but updating the input file names each hour as new forecasts are calculated...

Is the above still the case - that there is no way to automate the creation of a animation sequence using VAPOR/NCL via Python and command line scripting? It'd be a fantastic feature for some work I am supporting using WRF data outputs, and I see this thread is several years old... any workarounds?

Hi, yes this is still the case for VAPOR. We are re-factoring the code to allow future support of a scripting interface, but it is probably a year or two out.

 

You can of course script animations with NCL

 

cheers - jc