Getting Started

Mazaika-Animation is add-on software to Mazaika program. This means that at first you need to use Mazaika for MS Windows to assemble a mosaic and save rendered mosaic project to .mazprj file. Your work with Mazaika-Animation starts when you have saved .mazprj file.

1 - Start Mazaika-Animation program and open .mazprj file. Open it with Open Mazaika Project... menu or simple drag and drop it into Mazaika-Animation window.

2 - Adjust animation parameters. Usually you may need to change duration of Fly-In sections, edit a list of cells that you want to show enlarged in zoom section of the movie and select animation segments that you want to include in the exported movie.

4 - Start Export procedure by pressing Export button. Export procedure may takes some time. It depends from size of the mosaic and overall animation movie duration.

If there is a large mosaic with lot of cells and made from large cell images it may takes an extra time to generate all layer pictures. While you are waiting the program is working in Draft Preview mode. In this mode you may adjust all animation parameters but you'll be unable to export mosaic movie. Export option is active when layers picture generation process is complete.

The main idea of the program is to grab content of a video display window and write it into a movie file. The size of the video display window is limited by your software and hardware and as a rule of thumb you may expand the window to a whole display. (Use Full Screen Preview option) However some systems with modern Windows OS and powerful graphic cards allow you to set the size of the video preview larger than that of your connected monitor. If you have one of this system you may generate movies with extra resolution with no additional efforts. (Simply check on Full Screen Preview option and manually enter your extra size values)

If you can't enter Width/Hight size larger than your display resolution or if generated video frames are rendered only within display area limits you may improve the situation by plugging in some larger external display like HD/4K TV set or monitor and move video preview window to that display. Alternatively you may try to change resolution of your built-in display. For example if you use some sort of modern Retina Display notebooks you may have to select 100% resolution that will give you bigger desktop size.

Along with completed animation movie file the program saves separate move frames (i.e. a sequence of Jpeg files) in *.frames folder. This allows you to use your favorite video editor to assemble the video from separate images or insert animation sequence to your existed video footage without extra decoding-encoding cycle. If you don't need it please delete the folder manually.