At this point, the user is satisfied with the quality and duration of the movie frames and wishes to export them into a movie outside of AIPS. The user may proceed in a number of ways. For contour movies, frames can be written out of AIPS in postscript format. It is important that identical contour levels (in mJy/beam) be used for all the frames. The files are then converted to GIF format which can be done with software such as XV, Adobe Photoshop, or ps2gif.
For color movies, the frames can be displayed on the AIPS TV and the images are captured with the task TVCPS or even XV. Also, the frames can be exported to software packages like the Caltech VLBI package or IDL. The same display scale should be used for all the frames. Scripts to implement these steps in AIPS are available upon request. We combine the movie frames (now in a standard graphics file format) into movie clips using Adobe Premiere for export to video tape, animated GIFs, or Quicktime movies. Other formats are supported by Premiere. Also, IDL has been used to compile movies similar to ours (B.G. Piner, personal communication).