[R] Playing with rgl: a Youtube video

[Duncan Murdoch]

I've just posted a demo made with the rgl package to Youtube, visible 
here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prdZWQD7L5c

For future reference, here are the steps I used:

1.  Design a shape to be displayed, and then play with the animation 
functions to make it change over time.  Use play3d to do it live in R, 
movie3d to write the individual frames of the movie to .png files.

2.  Use the ffmpeg package (not an R package, a separate project at 
http://ffmpeg.org) to convert the .png files to an .mp4 file.  The 
individual frames totalled about 1 GB; the compressed movie is about 45 
MB. 

3.  Upload to Youtube.  I'm not a musician, so I had to use one of their 
licensed background tracks, I couldn't write my own.  I spent a lot of 
time picking one and then adjusting the timing of the video to 
compensate.  Each render/upload cycle at full resolution took about an 
hour and a half.  It's a lot faster to render in a smaller window with 
fewer frames per second, but it's still tedious.   It's easier to 
synchronize if you actually have a copy of the music locally, but 
Youtube doesn't let you download their music.  So the timing isn't 
perfect, but it's good enough for me!

Duncan Murdoch