Working with Animations > Creating Animations and Movies > About Creating, Saving, Importing, and Exporting Animations
  
About Creating, Saving, Importing, and Exporting Animations
You can create an animation by recording. There are two automatic recording modes:
• Record Content—Records changes to the position of items, annotations, and sections.
• Record Camera—Records changes to the camera’s position.
In the automatic recording modes, a recording indicator appears in the graphics area and the status bar. You can click the recording indicator in the status bar to pause, and then click pause to restart the recording. Tracks are added in the Keyframe Editor when you move a new item or create new content. Every time you make a change, the timeline in the Keyframe Editor is extended by an increment and a new key is created. The manual recording mode is called Capture. Use it to take a manual snapshot of selected items, item orientation, camera positions, or both. In Record Content mode, you can add these effects to one or more parts:
• Fly In and Fly Out—Flies items in to, and out of, the scene (respectively) along a coordinate system axis. You choose the flight axis, -X, -Y, -Z, or, +X, +Y, +Z, from the Fly In or Fly Out submenu. You can also choose the coordinate system: Global (default) or Part.
For example, if you click +Z on the Fly In submenu with the Part check box selected, each selected part flies in along the +Z axis in its own part coordinate system.
The Fly In and Fly Out effects also include fade effects. Selected items will:
◦ Fade in during the first half of the Fly In effect.
◦ Fade out during the second half of the Fly Out effect.
• Fade Out—Adds a transition from opaque to transparent.
• Fade In—Adds a transition from transparent to opaque.
• Shake—Rotates items slightly in one direction, and then the other, about each coordinate axis in sequence. The sequence repeats for the duration of the effect.
• Pulse—Scales items slightly larger, and then smaller, along each coordinate axis in sequence. The sequence repeats for the duration of the effect.
• Flash—Alternates between the current color and the specified flash color twice per animation step. The shorter the step, the faster the flashes. When you select Flash, the Choose Color dialog box opens so you can select the flash color.
• Color—Adds a transition from the original color to another color.
• Unscrew—Translates the selected parts while rotating them. You can unscrew parts individually or combined as a unit.
Animation effects can be applied to annotation sets.
Click Restore Location to move all parts back to their sBOM positions.
You can import an animation that matches the current sBOM structure.
The imported animation may contain information about the conversion factors for time and space definitions, or you may have to specify them in the import dialog box.
Animations are saved in a figure.
You can also export an animation as a movie.
Only file formats based on the *.wmv capture codecs installed will be available for Export.
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The list of codecs available for export is determined by the list of *.wmv video capture (encoder) codecs you currently have installed. You can find the list of installed Video Codecs in the Technical Support Information for Microsoft Windows Media Player.