movie-making for the compleat novice

[arritt at kuhub.cc.ukans.edu]

Here's our situation: We have a SGI 4D/25, are buying a 4D/35, and want to
be able to make videotapes of results from our numerical models.  We
ordered something called a "genlock" board with the 4D/35 because we were
told we would need it to dump the screen to a VCR.
Once we get our hardware set up, what kind of software do we need?
Do we need a special animation package to make it all work?

The main problem is that we're theorists who don't really know much at
all about the nuts-and-bolts of programming in general or the graphics 
business in particular, but DO understand that thoughtful
graphics can significantly clarify the display of scientific data.
We have managed to turn enormous files of floating-point numbers into
"still" pictures, and now want to string a lot of these together to
show how our solutions evolve in time.  Currently one of us (me) is using
NCAR Graphics 3.0 and the other is using some stuff from NCSA.

What we'd like to do is to keep using the same graphics programs we're
using now to generate "stills", and dump the data a frame-at-a-time
to a VCR.  (Fortunately we need to make only fairly short
movies, maybe a minute or so at a time.)  If we have to use
a special graphics program, we'd need to either (1) recode all of our
stuff ourselves, and like I said, we're theorists rather than programmers
(i.e. it'd take us forever, IF we could get it to work at all); or (2) hire a 
programmer (actually we'd like to hire a programmer anyway, but can't get 
the $$$ given the current environment for research funding).  

Can it be done?  We have a *little* money left over for hardware/software;
will we need a special frame-advance VCR?  Any advice you can offer -- even
"give up, it'll never work", with reasons why -- would be appreciated.
________________________________________________________________________
Raymond W. Arritt                     | 
Assistant Professor                   |
Dept. of Physics and Astronomy        |  "everyone knew that as time went
Univ. of Kansas                       |   by they'd get a little bit older
Lawrence, KS  66045                   |   and a little bit slower..."
arritt at kuhub.cc.ukans.edu             |               
arritt at ukanvax.bitnet                 |