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Mike Mayer avatar image
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Mike Mayer asked Matthew Gillespie commented

Issues with Video Recorder

I also am having trouble getting the video recorder to work in 2017.0.3. When I drag the eyedropper into the view I want, it shows nothing as I drag it around (usually there's a white box with the tree path when using the eyedropper for other stuff). I can do this for about 3 seconds then FlexSim goes into a "Not Responding" state indefinitely, at 13% CPU. I left it once over lunch, and had to kill the flexsim.exe process when I got back. This is Windows 7.

Since I was not able to pick the view with the eyedropper, I did hunt-down the tree entry for the node path to the named view (MODEL:/Tools/PerspViews/Video) and found the corresponding tree variable for "View" in the video recorder, and pasted it there via the tree view (the video recorder GUI would not let me paste it into that field). It now shows up OK in the "View" field of the basic sequence video recorder option, however when I click "Record" I get a popup error "Basic sequence view is invalid". "Video" is a valid view I created in the views list.

Another thing I noticed, is that I cannot set the "Speed" to 0.8 in the video recorder. 0.8 is the visually optimal run speed for my model for the video I want to record. I set it to 0.8, but it reverts to 1 every time I click something else, or when click record. How can I get it to keep 0.8? Speed 1 is too fast.

My workaround for all of this was to use the video recording feature of SnagIt, the commercial image & video capture utility. To do this, I manually forward the simulation to where I wanted it to start, reset the speed to 0.8, click Record in SnagIt, click Run in FlexSim then click the Play button for my desired 3D flypath to begin. Then when the model and flypath are at the correct finishing point (about 120 seconds later), I click the SnagIt recorder's Stop button. The resulting video is saved to disk as an mp4. The recorded result is OK, but choppy since SnagIt is simply recording from the computer's video buffer, and thus any lag due to CPU, system I/O, or video board lag, gets recorded along with it as chop. Whereas the internal FlexSim recorder outputs video as rendered frame by frame perfectly. I recall this being a nice feature of the recorder in the previous version.

Thanks for any tips.

FlexSim 17.0.3
video recordercrashing
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Matthew Gillespie avatar image
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Matthew Gillespie answered Matthew Gillespie commented

I recently fixed an issue for 17.0.4 that sounds just like the one you're describing. The issue was that if you sample over something where the view is null (e.g. something outside the program like a spot of your desktop between the sampler button and the view you're going to sample) FlexSim would crash. You can avoid this crash by avoiding moving the sampler icon over any views that won't return a value.

The speed field issue is being caused by the GUI setting its viewtext using a numtostring with no precision. So whenever the GUI opens it's setting the value to a rounded value. If you set the value and then click apply, the value in the tree will be the correct 0.8 value and you can record with that setting. However, if you close and reopen the view it will revert to 1. I will get this issue fixed for 17.0.4

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Mike Mayer avatar image Mike Mayer commented ·

That's good news Matt, thanks for the head's up on the next version's fixes.

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