Generate a movie silently

Dear all,

I am familiar with the standard procedure to create an animation/video in MATLAB with e.g.:

vidObj = VideoWriter('video.avi');
vidObj.FrameRate = 20;
vidObj.Quality = 100;
open(vidObj);
figure(Figure_Video)
currFrame=getframe(gcf);
writeVideo(vidObj,currFrame);
close(vidObj);

However, suppose if the creation of the animation takes few hours (one frame each minute) and i want to do some other work (writing texts, emails) with the same computer. Each minute MATLAB captures the display/mouse and makes it even unpossible to do some other work.

Therefore my question:

Is there an easy way to create an animation silently in the background?

Thank you!

[Image Analyst]

Are you just creating images? Or are you doing graphics, like with plot(), line(), scatter(), etc.? If it's just images, there is no need to display them before adding to your movie structure.

[ConvexHull]

No i use graphics like trisurf().

Edit: To be more precise, i investigate some two dimensional CFD simulations with MATLAB on unstructured quad-meshes.

[Image Analyst]

There is a command line way to start MATLAB with a -nodisplay option though I've never done it. Put a line in your startup code to automatically launch your m-file and see if that works.

[ConvexHull]

I will try it later. Thanks for your help. I let you know.

[Ameer Hamza]

Which command are you using which grab the mouse attention from other applications? Using the code in your question does not result in grabbing the mouse attention. For example, run the following code. You can continue to work on your other applications (at least this works in macOS)

v = VideoWriter('temp.mp4', 'MPEG-4');
open(v)

x = linspace(1,10);
y = sin(x);

fig = figure();
for i=1:numel(x)
    plot(x(1:i), y(1:i));
    currFrame = getframe(fig);
    writeVideo(v, currFrame);
end
close(v);

Although you can avoid multiple calls to plot(), I just write it like this to show even this does not grab attention. You are probably writing so another command which grabs attention. My guess is that you have written the line

figure(Figure_Video)

inside the loop.

[Image Analyst]

Also, switching to a particular axes will steal focus:

axes(handles.axesImage); % This call steals focus.

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

See this link: https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/5781-how-can-i-render-and-export-many-figures-without-the-figures-grabbing-the-window-focus-all-the-time

[ConvexHull]

Thanks for your answer and sorry for my late response.

The most important command is the

set(0, 'CurrentFigure', fig_A);

instead of

figure(fig_A);

With this it is even possible to call

• getframe or
• multiple figures inside a loop or
• copy subplots from fig_A to fig_B

without any troubles.

Regards