Selecting Animate from the Options menu of the AIPS View window displays the Animation and Blinking panel in the AIPS View window.
At the top of the panel are three AutoSlice modes, which from left to right do the following:
To stop an animation at any point, press the AutoSlice button which was selected to start the animation.
To the right of the three AutoSlice buttons is a button labeled Relative Indexing. This button controls how the animations of two different data sets are synchronized and is described in Section 3.1.2.
Next is a speed control slider. Move it continuously by pointing at the slider with the mouse pointer and moving left or right while holding the left mouse button down. Speed may be adjusted by jumps of 10% by clicking to the left or right of the slider control. Clicking to either side of the bar with the middle button will move the bar to the cursor.
Next is a frame number control slider. An animation will go between the values set in the Slice Information field at the top of the Display window (see Section 2.4.1); these may be edited but by default this is the full range of the slice being animated. During animation, this changes automatically without user control. Push the AutoSlice button a second time to stop an animation. While the animation is stopped, the frame number slider may be moved manually with the mouse. The left and middle mouse button operations described for the speed control slider work on this slider also.
Animations are loaded into pixmap RAM memory of your display computer during the first pass. If your pixmaps will fit into RAM, movies and blinking will run very fast. If virtual memory must be used, the animations will slow down considerably. Making the images smaller on the screen so their pixmaps will fit into RAM will improve animation performance. If virtual memory is exceeded, aipsview will abort.
All Displays which have been ``included'' via the Options menu on each Display window (see Section 2.3.4) will be included in a synchronized animation. If no window is ``included'' aipsview will choose the first window opened that has more than one plane (i.e., you don't have to ``include'' a window if it's the only 3D one open). Displays may be added or removed during an animation. It is up to the user to insure that a multi-image animation makes sense, i.e., that the zero point and spacing of the axis being animated are the same in the various data sets.
The Relative Indexing button only affects the simultaneous
animation of multiple data sets. When this button is turned off (the
default), data sets are animated by frame number. When the
Relative Indexing is activated, frames in all data sets are
animated starting with the first frame of any included data sets (with
more than one plane in the Z axis). Note that for synchronized
animations one of the windows is primary; the total number of
frames and frame numbers are derived from this primary window. In a
group of animated windows the primary window is generally the first
one opened. The specific action of this Relative Indexing
toggle is illustrated in the following example, in which two windows
(A [primary] and B) are animated. The channel ranges have been
constrained to 
for A and 
for B in the Slice
Information subpanel of their respective Display windows, see
Section 2.4.1. The following table lists the frame numbers
displayed throughout the animation for both the normal and relative
indexing modes.
| Iteration | Normal | Relative Indexing | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | B | A | B | |
| 1 | 5 | - | 5 | 7 |
| 2 | 6 | - | 6 | 8 |
| 3 | 7 | 7 | 7 | 9 |
| 4 | 8 | 8 | 8 | 10 |
| 5 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 11 |
| 6 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 12 |
The last button on the animation panel is the Blink button. If two (or more) data sets are ``included'' (see Section 2.3.4), turning on the blink function will open a new window and run an animation through all of the display frames which have been included. Any plane from a 3D data cube may be blinked with the single plane of a 2D data set, or any plane of a different 3D data set. It is up to the user to insure that the blink makes sense, i.e., that the image displays are on the same grid. Press one of the AutoSlice buttons at the top of the Animation panel to start (stop) a blink animation. To remove the blink window, turn off the blink button on the animation panel by pressing it.
