Hi there, I am trying to create an MPEG from an animation file. I've followed all the guidelines suggested from previous postings such as making the graphics window smaller etc, and I even find that an MPEG file has been created in my folder. However, when i try to play the animation on windows media player i get the warning that 'invalid or currupt data' is present. can you see where i'm going wrong?

thanks in advance! gary.

We had the problem come up in our office a few days ago. People who wish to produce animations for presentation purposes (rather than as a quick method of evaluation for their own purposes) tend to use third party software as opposed to fluent. It is possible to set up an "execute command" to produce a set of stills (jpeg's or tiff's etc) while fluent is iterating. One can then compile them in a number of ways to create an mpeg or other animation file. We prefer to use animated gif's here as they are very portable. Here is a very good webpage with instructions:

http://www.bakker.org/cfm/graphics01.htm

People I know who create mpeg's use some software called AnimationShop, which I have been told is very good.

There are some things to point out: if the animation was created from an unsteady problem (and you saved the animation frames as metafiles during the time steps to create the mpeg file later) and supposing you are in windows environment, be sure that the path of the directory containing the .hdi files (Fluent_Inc/ntbin/ntx86) will be in the environmental variable PATH. If you are on unix machine, just forget to create a viewable animation there: convert the metafiles into jpg or tiff, send em on a windows machine and then join them with some external application (makeavi for example, it's freeware, or image magick).

Hope this helps,

Edi.

ok thanks very much for the tips. I'll give it a try today! gary.