fScan Reference Manual, Chapter 2 (CmdLineOptions): movie

Movie -- Generate average timecourse movie

usage: -movie func duration name wsiz offset binsize flag

The MOVIE command creates a time series data set. Most usage options involve processing an existing image data set to create a new time series of a specified duration (in seconds). The FUNC argument specifies what type of image processing to do. If FUNC is 'images' the MOVIE command creates a new BXH style XML file (NEWBXHFILE) made of a time series of JPEG images as described in an existing text file list (see “Movie Images” below.)

Movies are generated by averaging images across multiple epochs within a time series, where each epoch is defined by a DURATION relative to some starting event. If REF is specified it is the name of a reference time course and the movie starting events are event time points in REF. If no REF is specified, the starting event points are uniformly spaced every DURATION seconds.

The DELAY argument allows you to shift the starting events DELAY seconds before (negative DELAY values) or after (positive values) the REF (or every DURATION) time events.

The BINSIZE argument lets you specify how many seconds of input image time points should be combined in each movie frame. By default, BINSIZE is 1 input image volume time point ($TRES) by default. The number of frames generated in the output movie is DURATION/BINSIZE.

The SKIP argument allows you to skip some time at the beginning of the data set (in case there are start-up transient signals).

Note that SKIP and DELAY both affect which images are included at the beginning of the movie cycle, but in different ways. If you have a 24s cycle and you skip 6s, then your first cycle will start at time 0 but would ignore the first 6s so that cycle would only include 18s of data and your cycle start times would be at 0, 24s, 48s, etc. But if you have 24s cycle and you delay 6s, then your first cycle will start at time 6s, and all your cycles are shifted by 6s, with start times at 6s, 30s, 54s, etc.

The way a movie is generated is controlled by the FUNC name, which is a key word appearing as the first argument (not counting “verbose”). FUNC can be any of the following:

Note: If “verbose” appears immediately after MOVIE (before the FUNC name), the command will display image sorting information before it executes.

Movie Images

The 'images' function is an unusual form of the MOVIE command. It creates an image data set out of a list of JPEG files. The command expects 2 filename arguments:

ImageList Format:
The ImageList is a plain text file with lines that contain a JPEG file name and its onset time. Any line that does not start with the name of a valid JPEG file will be ignored. Two different syntax forms are recognized:

The Movie Images command simply converts the ImageList file to a BXH file; it does not load the new data set.

See Also:
fScan Home, fScan Manual, CmdLineOptions, Manual Help