Creating animations using Time Manager

In this recipe, we will use the Time Manager plugin to create an image series out of our spatiotemporal QGIS project and turn it into a video, which is ready to be uploaded on Youtube or added into a presentation using easily available and free tools.

Getting ready

To follow this recipe, it's advisable that you complete the previous recipe, Exploring spatiotemporal vector data using Time Manager, to set up this project.

To turn the image series exported by Time Manager into a video, we can use external programs, such as the command-line tool Mencoder, or the free Windows Movie Maker.

Mencoder is a very useful command-line tool to encode videos, which is available from repositories for many Linux distributions and for Mac. Windows users can download it from Gianluigi Tiesi's site at http://oss.netfarm.it/mplayer-win32.php.

If you're using Windows, you can also create the video using the free Windows Movie Maker application, which can be downloaded from http...