Playing the movie

Congratulations! You have just created a zoom movie. Let’s have a look at it.

  • Move the time slider slowly back to frame 1.

Note that the fractal window immediately recalculates as soon as you move the slider to show how the zoom is interpolated from frame 1 to frame 100. Dragging the time slider back and forth is a convenient way of previewing the animation quickly or precisely.

Ultra Fractal play Playing the movie  

To view a real-time preview of the animation, click the Play button on the animation bar. The animation will keep looping until you click somewhere or hit a key.

The level of detail of the preview depends on the speed of your computer — as long as you are using the Guessing drawing method. To make the preview faster, you can reduce the size of the fractal window on the Image tab of the Fractal Properties tool window.

Any fractal in Ultra Fractal is potentially an animation. As you have seen, you can turn any still fractal into an animation by enabling Animate mode and changing the fractal in some way.

Look at the time slider. Two blue dots have appeared, one at frame 1, and one at frame 100. If you set the slider to exactly frame 1 or 100, the corresponding dot turns into a yellow marker to show that it is at the current frame.

Ultra Fractal play timeslider Playing the movie

Ultra Fractal transparent Playing the movie
Ultra Fractal tip Playing the movie
Most commands on the animation bar are also available on the Animation menu, with keyboard shortcuts.

Ultra Fractal tip Playing the movie
The preview is always played with a fixed frame rate. To change the preview frame rate, click Options on the Options menu to open the Options dialog, and click the Fractal tab. The Animation preview speed setting is in the Advanced calculation options area.

See also Calculation details.

When you make changes to a fractal while Animate mode is on, Ultra Fractal records animation keys at the current frame, and at frame 1 if there are no animation keys yet. The blue dots show at which frames the animation keys are located. When you click on a dot, the time slider jumps to the frame at which the key was recorded.

 
Ultra Fractal learnmore Playing the movie
Animation keys

Next: Experimenting with Animate mode

Playing the movie