Me again :-(
System: Windows 7, MikTeX 2.9, WinEdt 7, LaTeX->Dvips->ps2pdf pipe
Trying the same animation as a year ago - just for the sake of being specific. This year I am teaching multivariable calculus so my needs will be a bit different, and this time I am aiming a bit higher.
Below you can see one animation I want to embed to a PowerDot presentation
It is 64 frames of GIF. Filesize about 150 kB. As we all know we cannot mix .gif and .eps (sigh), so something has to give. The animation is generated by Mathematica, so I have the options of exportin it (as well as individual frames) at least in .eps, .gif, .swf, .avi, .png formats.
Last year I managed using media9. That package is good for many a thing, but to use it I needed to convert the animation to either .swf or .mp4. And that's were the problems lie. Try as I may I was unable to get the conversion to keep the video quality. Hardly a surprise as neither of those formats is designed with compressing mathematical plots in mind. The avi-file has size 10MB at this quality, but both the swf and mp4 look cruddy in comparison - the curves look like they were first anti-aliased to 160x100 screen resolution and left at that with all the jaggies (your eyes are spared, because we cannot embed an mp4 to a question). The conversion service linked to in the previous question cannot be coerced to do lossless compression. To tell you the truth I don't know if there is anything like lossless mp4?
Are there options other than media9? This is only 64 frames (and I can compromise with a lower number). Or can you recommend a conversion program that produces higher quality mp4s from this kind of frames.
Will using the animate package help? Will that necessitate each frame to come from a separate file or can it handle an animated GIF?
animate
package. Can you direct Mathematica to produce vector graphics (in EPS format, as required by Powerdot)?animate
package allow LaTeX to output everything in a single pdf-file?