Including Mathematica animations in beamer presentations

We are going to animate a rotating cardioid. Running the following code in mathematica should create 50 frames of the rotation.

(* Rotation Matrix *) rot[r_]:={{Cos[r],-Sin[r]},{Sin[r],Cos[r]}} (* Function that renders a rotated cardioid in a 400x400 image size. For encoding to a movie, we should ensure that both the height and width are divisible by 8. *) g[r_]:=ParametricPlot[rot[r].{Cos[t]*(1 - Cos[t]), Sin[t]*(1 - Cos[t])}, {t, 0, 2 Pi}, AspectRatio -> Automatic, PlotRange -> {{-2, 2}, {-2, 2}}, ImageSize -> {400,400}] (* filename "frame??.jpg" (We need the filename to be padded with zeros like frame01.jpg. There is probably a better way to do this. *) filename[k_]:=If[k < 10,"frame0" <> ToString[k] <> ".jpg", "frame" <> ToString[k] <> ".jpg"] (* Number of frames *) frames=50; (* Save the frames *) Do[Export[filename[k],g[k*2*Pi/frames],"JPEG"],{k,0,frames-1}]

The result should be a sequence of images "frame??.jpg" with k running from 00 up to 49 in our directory.

Using mencoder to encode movies

Installation of mencoder on a Mac

To install mencoder on a Mac, you need to be able to open zip files. The most popular program to do this is StuffitExpander.

Download the file "ffmpegXbinaries20060307.zip" to your desktop. Then double click on it. StufitExpander should unzip it into a folder on your desktop called "ffmpegXbinaries20060307 Folder".

Now, open a terminal and do the following. You will have to enter your password to do the sudo command.

cd ~/Desktop/ffmpegXbinaries20060307\ Folder sudo cp mencoder /usr/bin

You should now be able to execute "mencoder" on the command line (in a terminal). You can now remove the file "ffmpegXbinaries20060307.zip" and the directory "ffmpegXbinaries20060307 Folder".

Installation of mencoder on Linux

Convert the sequence of images to a movie file

We will encode the jpeg frames into a movie using mencoder. See the mencoder manual. The following must be run in a terminal.

mencoder mf://frame??.jpg -mf w=400:h=400:fps=25:type=jpg -ovc lavc -ffourcc XVID -nosound -o output.avi

You will need to adjust the "w=400:h=400" portion to account for your images' width and height that you generated with mathematica. You should test the generated movie, "output.avi", on a Mac by attempting to view the movie in Quicktime.

Embed the movie in a beamer presentation

Download "movie15.sty" from CTAN's movie15 directory. If you need additional help, you may wish to consult the readme that can be found on the same page.

Also "ifdraft.sty" is needed by "movie15.sty". Download "ifdraft.dtx" from CTAN. Then execute the following.

Move the movie, "ifdraft.sty", and "movie15.sty" to the same directory, where we will create our latex presentation.

We give the following demonstration for embedding our movie an a beamer presentation. I call this file "movie.tex".

\documentclass{beamer} \mode < presentation > { \usetheme[compress]{Boadilla} } \usepackage{movie15} \title{A movie in a latex presentation} \author{Me} \begin{document} A rotating cardioid is amazing! \begin{center} \begin{figure}[ht] \includemovie[ poster, % shows initial frame before play begins controls, % controls are only available on a Mac (they will not appear on windows.) % (if no controls are used, then you can double click the movie to start it.) repeat, % repeat the movie over and over. text=(Loading movie...) % text shown while loading movie ]{6cm}{6cm}{output.avi} \end{figure} \end{center} \end{document}

This should generate the file "movie.pdf", which contains our embedded movie. In order to open the pdf file to see the movie, you will need to use a recent version of Adobe Reader on either OsX or Windows.