MovieMan

MovieMan is a simple package I wrote to ease the creation of high-quality movies in MATLAB. Some of the other tools I found were complicated to use and resulted in lots of distortion and encoding artifacts. The goal of MovieMan is to minimize conversion artifacts. MovieMan uses FFMPEG to encode high-bitrate MPEG-2 files, the same format used for digital broadcast TV.

Download here: movieman.tar.gz (March 16, 2009).
Just un-tar the file and the movieman directory to your MATLAB path.

You need to have FFMPEG installed for MovieMan to work. I was able to compile FFMPEG from the latest source on my Intel Mac Pro running OS 10.5.6 with zero problems or hassles. Hopefully you will be as lucky.

Here is an example of how to use MovieMan in MATLAB.

mm = mm_setup; % set up a MovieMan instance with default parameters

for i=1:N
  % create a figure for each frame
  % ... (your plotting code goes here)

  mm_addFrame(mm,gcf); % add a frame to the MovieMan instance
end

mm_render(mm); % render the MPEG-2 movie

% pretty easy, huh?

Troubleshooting: Sometimes MATLAB will export a figure that is either tiny or huge. This can happen when it gets confused about the paper units. The problem can usually be fixed by closing (not just clearing) the figure and starting again.

I am distributing this code under the MIT License.