The merge frames function can be useful in tidying up the appearance of a movie.
At certain points in some movies, there may be a large number of changes in consecutive frames. Depending on the performance of the PC playing back the movie, the Player may be unable to draw these frames quickly enough to give the impression that all of these changes happen together. It may be possible to use the Merge frames function to draw all of these changes in a single frame and improve the appearance of the movie.
An example of how to use the Merge frames function:
An application is recorded starting up, which comprises many separate, complex windows. In the movie, the individual windows do not seem to appear at the same moment, but are visibly drawn separately, across a number of frames.
To improve the appearance of the movie and have all the windows appear together in just one frame, you could merge the range of frames that starts just before any of the windows appear and ends just after the last one is fully drawn. This range of frames contains all the drawing operations needed to draw all the windows as the application starts up. Merging means that effectively all of these drawing operations are combined into just one frame, and the windows all appear together.
Merging does not affect the overall length of the movie. All of the merged frames appear identically in the resulting movie.
Note: when frames are merged, mouse movements are lost, so the mouse may appear to 'jump' from one place to another when playback reaches the merge point.
How to merge a range of frames:
Select a range of frames. For more help on selecting frames see Selecting frames.
On the Player main menu, select Edit
and then Merge Frames.
or
On the Edit toolbar, click
the Merge Frames button: