Question

I attempt to create a movie by looping through frames in MATLAB.

Refering to mathworks.com documentation at http://www.mathworks.com/help/techdoc/ref/movie.html, I’ve managed to animate a plot. However, issues arise when I attempt to save the movie in an avi file.

Both the avifile and VideoWriter methods from https://stackoverflow.com/a/8038540/818608, resulted in the same errors.

Although the animation runs fine, the saved movie consists of only one fixed frame, and at times, the screen capture includes an overlay of my background web browser.

Thank you in advance.

Below is the code I used, and the frame that’s frozen on the avi is linked below.

Z = peaks; surf(Z); 
axis tight
set(gca,'nextplot','replacechildren');

vid = VideoWriter('myPeaks2.avi');
vid.Quality = 100;
vid.FrameRate = 15;
open(vid);
for k = 1:20 
    surf(sin(2*pi*k/20)*Z,Z)
    writeVideo(vid, getframe(gcf));
end
close(vid);

winopen('myPeaks2.avi')

Answer 1

Try the following:

    f = figure();
    Z = peaks; surf(Z);
    a = axes('Parent',f);
    axis(a,'tight');
    set(a,'nextplot','replacechildren');
    vid = VideoWriter('myPeaks2.avi');
    vid.Quality = 100;
    vid.FrameRate = 15;
    open(vid);
    for k = 1:20
        surf(a,sin(2*pi*k/20)*Z,Z)
        writeVideo(vid, getframe(f));
    end
    close(vid);

    winopen('myPeaks2.avi')

It contains explicit handles using instead of implicit. Many chaos is caused in Matlab because people tend to use the implicit ones, like “gcf”, “gca” which should have been removed completely from the language, IMHO.