|
Northern
Eclipse Help Reference |
AVI Movie File (*.avi) |
This file format supports 8-bit to 24-bit images. It was designed as a movie format so it supports multiple frames.
This is the standard movie format that Windows uses since Windows 3.1. It stands for Audio/Video Interleave. It was designed to store image frames mixed with a sound track and a program called Windows Movie Player was provided in order to playback the file. On playback, only a small portion of the file is ever in memory at one time. The image frames are stored as Windows Bitmaps so they can be processed with the Windows API. It is also usually compressed data (although this is not a requirement) so the quality of any one frame is usually not good enough for image processing. Also it is inherently time-based so it is not nearly as flexible for 3D needs. On the surface it would seem that this is not a good candidate for an image analysis file format.
However, with an uncompressed AVI, you get a nearly universally supported multi-layer file format with low memory requirements since only a small fraction of the image needs to be held in memory. This makes an AVI file ideal for mass distribution of results. Also, the time-based nature might be a feature for experiments such as time lapse or brightness over time.
Eclipse supports the creation of AVI files through the Make AVI Movie plugin. It also supports loading of uncompressed AVI files through the AVI Drop in Loader. See Drop in Loader activation for more details. Once the Drop in loader is activated, it acts like a built in file format.
|
References |