Movies

You can display data in movie form from both the Graph Window and the Layout Editor. This feature provides an entirely new way to explore data. Making a movie is simple. The movie can be viewed in FlowJo or saved to disk to view in other programs. A Graph Window movie (below) displays a single population. A Layout movie (click here) displays the results of batching any number of graphs simultaneously.

Graph Window Movie

A movie made from the graph window divides the events in the graph among the frames of the movie. To generate the movie, simply select Graph > Make Movie... while viewing a graph you would like to see animated. FlowJo shows you the following dialog window:

Here you can choose how the movie should be generated. There are several options available. The primary concern is to choose the control parameter, which is the third dimension that will be added to the graph. If time is an existing parameter in your data, then it will be the default choice as the control parameter. Otherwise, you can choose any other parameter you wish.

When generating a movie from a graph window, FlowJo will divide the events into slices that are ordered sequentially across the control parameter. You can choose whether the slices will be made with an even number of channels per slice, (check Equal Number of Channels per Frame) or with a variable width slice that contains an equal number of events in each of the slices. (Remove the checkmark from Equal Number of Channels per Frame)

In the generated movie, the control parameter will be drawn in a histogram, with a red bar over the area that contains the events currently visible in the main (upper) graph. If the Equal number of channels per frame box is selected, the red bar will always have the same width as it moves across the histogram. If it not checked, the width of the red rectangle will vary so that the area under the curve inside the red bar is the same for each frame.

You can specify the Maximum number of frames, that the movie will contain. The larger the number of frames, the longer it will take to generate the movie, but the more sensitive it will be to trends that exist within a small range of values.

For some types of analysis, it is useful to graph events not of each individual slice, but for all of the events up to and including the current slice. The checkbox Display accumulates as movie progresses will cause the graph of each frame to include all of the events with a value for the control parameter of less than or equal to the frame's current value.

For more information, see these example movies:

• Time as the movie control: Kinetic display of calcium flux
• A third parameter as a movie control (equal channels per frame)
• A third parameter as a movie control (equal events per frame)

Layout Movie

The Layout Editor lets you set up a sample arrangement of graphs and statistics and then automatically generate the same arrangement for all samples in a Workspace group. This is called Batching. You may choose to view this batch of graphs as frames in a movie. Click the Batch button in the Layout Editor when you have the prototype frame laid out to your satisfaction.

This will bring up the Create Batch Report dialog where you can select Make Movie. When you select the Create button, a QuickTime movie will be generated with a frame for each sample in the current group. Batches can be organized by keyword as well. For more information about the options for creating batches, read the Iteration page.