MetaPost Movie "The Poor Ion Emitter"
=====================================

Herewith I put the following files into the public domain:

* makemovie, size  325, 2002-03-12 = shell script for movie generation
* x.mp,      size 7018, 2002-03-13 = MetaPost movie source file
* x.param,   size  422, 2002-03-13 = parameter file for mpeg_encode
* the resulting Movie in MPEG-1 format

All this is from my private spare time activity. No warranty whatsoever.

I hacked the movie in the nights of 10 and 11 March 2002 on a debian
Linux i686 PC. The code is sprinkled with noisy fuzz (uniformdeviate)
to make it reminiscent of ancient cinematography. It's a quick hack BTW;
don't expect any elegant MetaPost constructs.

MetaPost in fact allows to make crisp precision 2-D (only?) movies with
arbitrary resolution, e. g. for scientific or educational purposes. You
won't use uniformdeviate to artificially spoil the image quality then.

The rasterization by gs leads to ragged lines depending on the resolution
(here the image size is 640 * 480 pixels); pixels are either ON or OFF.

For a better/smoother result you may rasterize the MetaPost output by
gs to at least double size images, e. g. 1280 * 960 pixels, and then use
downsampling (e. g. convert from ImageMagick) to scale it back to 640 *
480 pixels, or whatever size you need. The downsampling filter produces
intermediate level pixels, so that transients and inclined lines will
look smoother, with much less raggedness.

The mpeg_encode was the only tool known to me at that time. Today I
would probably prefer mpeg2encode from http://www.mpeg.org/MSSG/ to
produce MPEG-2 output.

Have fun!

Hartmut


hartmut_henkel@gmx.de
http://www.circuitwizard.de

$Id: x.README,v 1.1 2005/09/27 22:22:45 karl Exp $