Create Movie for Head-Tilt Test

The "Create Movie for Head-Tilt Test" function offers the possibility to create AVI movies in a specific gaze position with changing head-tilt. Therefore, you can dynamically and very clearly illustrate a pathological situation, which shows a change in the Hess-Lancester test in different head-tilt positions. To access the dialog with the movie settings, select the menu item "Patient->3D-Model->Create Movie for Head-Tilt Test" via the main menu.

In the "Movie Elements" box you can select the elements you want to include in your movie. The two Hess-diagrams for right eye fixing and left eye fixing can only be selected, if the appropriate simulation result were already displayed in one of the diagram-windows of SEE++ before the dialog was opened. The "3D-Model" can always be selected and is included into the movie exactly as it is currently displayed in the 3D-view. You have to select at least one movie element to be able to create a movie.

The arrangement of the specific movie elements depends on the elements you have selected. If you have included both Hess-diagrams into the movie, they are always displayed side by side. If the 3D-model is additionally integrated into the movie, there exist two different cases.

In the first case both Hess-diagrams are displayed and the 3D-model is displayed above them. In the second case only one Hess-diagram is displayed and the 3D-model is displayed on the right hand side of the specific Hess-diagram.

During the creation of the movie, the head of the "virtual patient" is always first moved into the direction of the "1. Tilt Angle" and afterwards into the direction of the "2. Tilt Angle". At the beginning, the head-tilt is always set to 0° and the increment can specified set via the "Increment" field. The larger the value for the increment, the faster appears the head movement in the movie. The smaller the increment, the slower is the movement. Therefore, you can influence the movie speed by changing the increment.

The resolution determines the size of the movie and therefore the quality of the single frames of the movie (high resolution = better quality, but larger file). The list of the available resolutions contains the "name" of the resolution (e.g. "VGA"), the horizontal and vertical size of the resolution in pixel (e.g. 640x480) as well as the aspect ratio (width-to-height ratio, e.g. 4:3). Via the "Current Size" resolution you can achieve that the current sizes of the 3D-view and of the Hess-diagrams are used for the resolution of the movie (depending on which movie elements are selected).

Furthermore, you can configure the compression of the movie (via the button "Choose..." under "Compression") by selecting a specific codec. The selection of a codec determines the format, in which the movie is encoded and/or compressed. This codec has to be installed on the computer where you want to play the movie. By default some codecs are installed in Windows® for the creation of movies, but they provide only limited quality. Therefore, the "XviD"-Codec (www.xvid.org) is installed together with SEE++. This codec is free for use and provides a good movie quality with high compression. Furthermore, due to the automatic installation of the codec together with SEE++, it is guaranteed that the movies created with SEE++ can be played on any computer where SEE++ is installed (unless a different codec was manually selected for the creation of a movie).

Only change the default codec (XviD), if you are absolutely sure. Your movies could have bad quality or possibly cannot be played on a different computer.

You have to specify a file name and a directory before you can create the movie. Via the "Browse..." button the default dialog for the saving of an AVI file is opened. Navigate to the directory where you want to save the movie file to and name the movie file appropriately. The file extension of a movie is always ".avi". The selected directory as well as the chosen name are displayed in the field below "Filename" after the default dialog for saving AVI files has been closed with a click on "OK".

If you have finished all your settings, confirm the dialog with "OK" and the movie will be created. With a click on "Cancel" the dialog is closed and no movie is created.

If you want to cancel the creation of a movie, push the "ESC" key during the creation process. The canceling can take several seconds! During the creation of a movie for the head-tilt test, SEE++ automatically performs two passes to determine the maximum expansion of the Hess-diagrams. If you cancel the creation of the movie during the first cycle, no file is created. If the creation is canceled during the second cycle, those parts of the movie, which were already created until the process was canceled, are stored in the AVI file.