Animation video of dynamic data

[kerstinsailer]

Hi there,

I am a new Gephi user and am trying to find my way around doing the visualisations I want to do.
I have a dynamic data set on the growth of a scientific co-authorship community from 1979 to 2010 and have managed to import my data into Gephi as dynamic data (the data is grouped into 10 different periods at the moment, so is not as dynamic as it could be, I know...)

Now, is it possible to directly record a video or an animation of how the network grows over time, for instance as shown here: https://gephi.org/2011/the-egyptian-rev ... n-twitter/
Or do I necessarily have to export screenshots? But using the timeline as a filter all I seem to get is a static view rather than how nodes and ties are dynamically added?

Any pointers gladly taken. I'm no programmer, so techie-heavy solutions might be tricky for me...
Thanks!

[elijah]

The only way to currently animate in Gephi is to use a script with the Gephi Toolkit or to screencast. I'm going to release the Java scripts I've used to make a few animations in a couple days, but you'll need to know a bit of Java for that (not much, trust me).

[jbilcke]

The only way to currently animate in Gephi is to use a script with the Gephi Toolkit or to screencast. I'm going to release the Java scripts I've used to make a few animations in a couple days, but you'll need to know a bit of Java for that (not much, trust me).

I would be interested by these screencast scripts! I'm often asked for this feature by users during presentations.

[mbastian]

Julian did you look at http://jffmpeg.sourceforge.net/? It looks like they did a good job at rewriting some video encoding codec in pure Java (no native library needed). That is exactly what we need.

[richie.kavanagh]

Hi guys,
I'm very interested in these animations too.
I had thought about the static screenshots option but I fear this will quickly become unmaintainable.

Does anybody have a sample script of this interaction with the Gephi toolkit to get me started?
I'd really really appreciate this.

Richie

[francesco]

Hello,

I was wondering how this project evolved?
Is there a way to avoid using screencast?

I am not afraid of getting my hands dirty with some codes

Francesco

[admin]

The feature is not specified nor implemented, so feel free to fix it

[francesco]

Ok.

Can you give me a good start point. What part of the code should I focus on? Is there any existing plugin that has not been integrated yet?

[admin]

You should focus on the Timeline module for animation controlling, and Preview module for graphics capturing. Notice that the start-stop button may not be related to the start/stop button of the timeline, in case when users don't have dynamic networks but want to record layout animations.

When we investigated the tech issues, we found that we better use a Java binding to ffmpeg for video encoding, and provide encoding options in Gephi user interface.

[seinecle]

Hi Francesco,
Any progress by any chance?

Thx!

Clement