Occasionally, I do screen captures.  I use the Microsoft Expression Encoder.  It’s not pretty, but I think it’s free.  The output, by default, is a WMV (Windows Media Video) file.

YouTube is perfectly okay with WMV files.  However, for an animation to show up in Twitter, it has to be an animated GIF with a limit of 5 MB.

Enter ImageMagick:

convert -resize 50% -deconstruct -layers optimize inputFile.wmv outputFile.gif

This took a 14-20 MB animated GIF (uncompressed) to 1.36 MB.  Which is nice, because then I can show gems like this:

https://twitter.com/okiAndrew/status/763819198875402244

Cheers!

In any iterative process, it is nice to see progress.

Recently, it was gravity model distribution (again), so I had a process in R to calibrate friction factors, and part of it exported the trip length frequency chart:

ggsave(paste("TLF", Purpose, Period, "_Iter", iteration, "plot.png", sep=""))

So I was left with 30 charts showing progress.  So for kicks (a little), I animated the charts using ImageMagick:

One of the charts. Click for larger and animated.

To do this, you need Imagemagick (scroll down for Windows) and the following command line:

convert -resize 75% TLFHBWOP_Iter%dplot.png[1-30] HBWOP.gif

The resize parameter is optional, I used it to reduce the image size down to something allowable by Twitter.