Creating a Movie from a Series of Plots in R

Question

Is there an easy way to create a "movie" by stitching together several plots, within R?

Answer 1

Here is one method I found using R help:

To create the individual image frames:

jpeg("/tmp/foo%02d.jpg")
for (i in 1:5) {
  my.plot(i)
}
dev.off()

To make the movie, first install ImageMagick. Then call the following function (which calls "convert", part of ImageMagick I suppose):

make.mov <- function(){
     unlink("plot.mpg")
     system("convert -delay 0.5 plot*.jpg plot.mpg")
}

Or try using the ffmpeg function as described in this article (I've found this gives cleaner results): ffmpeg -r 25 -qscale 2 -i tmp/foo%02d.jpg output.mp4

May require a bit of tinkering, but this seemed pretty simple once everything was installed.

Of course, anywhere you see "jpg" or "jpeg", you can substitute GIF or PNG to suit your fancy.