What’s the best way to make a movie file from microscopy data? Maybe you need to generate a movie for the supplementary info for a paper, or insert one into your electronic lab notebook, or to show in a talk. The problem is that the requirements for each of those is different. This situation is compounded by the fact that there are so many options to make movie files and not much guidance on what is the best method.

I have long admired albums2hear, a Twitter bot that posts albums. You can read a bit more about it here. There was no mastodon equivalent and so I decided to build one. You can follow the bot – currently called Albums Albums Albums (or AlbumsX3) – here. Idea behind the bot The idea is to periodically post an album.

Generating movie files for publication can be a bit tricky. We have a protocol for making them for microscopy data, which simplifies things. However, we recently got this question from a journal: How can we do this? What information is needed for movie files?

A quick tech tip. I usually use Audacity for converting audio files and I have a few simple macros set up in there to make life easy. I had some opus music files which do not play in Apple’s Music app and therefore needed converting to MP3 format. Annoyingly, Audacity 3.1.2 on macOS does not currently import opus files, so I needed to find an alternative. The command line tool ffmpeg can be used to convert audio files. So how can we do it?

Over the holidays, I had an idea about looping an animation between two images. I wrote some code to do this in Igor Pro (sorry, no R this time…). This post describes how the code works and how you can make a similar animation. There was a reason to do this animation, but as a proof of principle I used two band logos.

Some great scientific data gets posted on Twitter. Sometimes I want to take a closer look and this post describes a strategy to do so. Edit: I received a request to take down the 3D volume images derived from the example dataset I used in this post. I’ve edited the post below so that is now a general guide. Grab the video It can be a bit difficult to the grab video from Twitter. The best way I’ve found is using youtube-dl.