NcAnimate

NcAnimate is a Java utility used to generate videos and maps from NetCDF files.

The application starts by loading a configuration file. It then determines what output files can be generated given the input NetCDF files available. It checks what files have already been generated and generate the missing ones or the outdated ones.

Glossary

• product: A generated file. Can either be a video or a map.
• video: A video file, such as a MPEG4, AVI, etc.
• map: In the context of a generated file, a map refer to a static image file such as a PNG, SVG, JPEG, etc.
• frame: A raw file generated by ncanimate2-frame, used to generate a video and/or to produce a map.
• field: An attribute of a JSON configuration.
• variable: In the context of a configuration file, it's a placeholder used to refer to other part of the config or the generation context. See section Substitution variables of this document for more information. In the context of a NetCDF file, a NetCDF variable refers to a multidimensional array of values.

Structure of a frame

A frame contains text labels, and a set of panel. It needs to contain at least 1 panel. There is no limit on the number of panel, but adding more panel increase the frame width. It gets crowded when the number of panels get higher than 4.

Each panel can be configured independently.

Panels are rendered in the frame as followed:

Each panel contains a list of layers, drawn on top of each other. The list of layer can be different for each panel.

Configuration

Configuration structure

Substitution variables

Code

Code structure

Compile and install

This project depends on 3 other eReefs projects:

• ereefs-database
• ereefs-ncanimate2-commons
• ereefs-ncanimate2-frame

Open-AIMS GitHub repository for ereefs-database: https://github.com/open-AIMS/ereefs-database This project is available through GitHub maven. You do not need to compile it locally.

Open-AIMS GitHub repository for ereefs-ncanimate2-commons: https://github.com/open-AIMS/ereefs-ncanimate2-commons This project is available through GitHub maven. You do not need to compile it locally.

Let's assume the projects will be downloaded in the following repository: ~/projects

1. Check-out, compile and package ereefs-ncanimate2-frame

   $ cd ~/projects
   $ git clone https://github.com/open-AIMS/ereefs-ncanimate2-frame.git
   $ cd ereefs-ncanimate2-frame
   $ mvn clean package
   

2. Check-out, compile and package ereefs-ncanimate2

   $ cd ~/projects
   $ git clone https://github.com/open-AIMS/ereefs-ncanimate2.git
   $ cd ereefs-ncanimate2
   $ mvn clean package
   

NOTE: ereefs-ncanimate2 assume it can find ereefs-ncanimate2-frame-X.X-jar-with-dependencies.jar jar in the following directory: ../ereefs-ncanimate2-frame/target. If your ereefs-ncanimate2-frame jar is elsewhere, you will have to provide the path to the jar or its directory using the configuration field render.ncanimateFrameJar in your NcAnimate configuration file. See Configuration structure for more information.

AWS Deployment / Execution

AWS deployment

AWS execution