export video of dynamic graphics in complex manipulate interface

Question

I have a complex manipulate interface with many controls that draws a rather complex graphics (more specifically, several graphics composed and displayed in a TabView). How can I export a video of only the graphics (without the controls) when varying one specific slider? I experimented with different options but all are unsatisfactory so far. In general, when I export manipulate, the image quality is low, even when I increase resolution. I obtained the best visual results with a screen capture (using Quicktime on Mac), but this is not convenient, and also has the problem that the framerate is bad (the graphics renders rather slowly).

As a side remark, when I right click on the graphic and try to export it, the exported image shows errors (as in red regions, as if some commands couldn't execute)

Is there a way to just export the frames (for only the graphics) in screen quality to a file, while animating a specific slider?

Answer 1

You have a couple of options

1) Add the the following options to your Manipulate

Bookmarks->{"1":>{var1=valInitial, var2=val2,...},"2":>{var1=valFinal,var2=val2,...}}, 
InterpolationOrder->1

where var1 is the name of the variable you wish to move between valInitial and valFinal and var2,... are the variables to hold constant. If you add "ControlAppearance"->None in your Export, you'll get what you want.

2) Replace the Manipulate by Table, at least for the one variable you're interested in. You'll need to do some fancy variable injection using With, and then you'll need to map Setting across the list to remove the controls. Here is an example. Notice how I'm initiallizing a to aInit, which is 1.5.

Setting /@ Table[
   With[{aInit = 1.5, tMax = tm}, 
       Manipulate[Plot[Sin[a t], {t, 0, tMax}], {{a, aInit}, 1, 2}]
   ],
   {tm, 1, 10}
]

This is now a list of graphics which you can export to your hearts content. I sometimes do this if I have a very complicate graphics and I want to do the export one frame at a time.

About your pinking in Export, that's probably a dynamic timeout during evaluation. Write Style[Manipulate[...],DynamicEvaluationTimeout -> 60] (or whatever number you wish to use, in seconds) to do the export.