I have a file, about 100 MB in size, consisting of several thousand density profiles, captured over time. These are just long sequences of {x,y} pairs specifying {radius, density}, separated by double newlines between each time capture.
I am currently using GNUplot to visualize the evolution of these profiles in time, but to be blunt, it sucks. The algorithm for fetching profile X seems to require re-scanning the entire file each time - meaning, to plot profile 1000, it has to re-read profiles 1 - 999 first. Then profile 1001 requires re-reading 1-1000, and so forth. This is basically O(n^2) running time, and so it slows down quite a bit as the animation progresses.
It’s also just a general pain in the ass - doing any kind of animation at all seems barely-supported, and requires a bit of a hack to begin with. There is no way to pause, rewind, continue, speed up, slow down, etc.
Surely there must be another program out there that will do what I want, without going full bore into some massive program like Paraview. Any suggestions?
There are just simple line graphs, I don’t need anything fancy at all, just reasonable animation support.
How exactly are you sending the data to GNUPlot? It sounds like you’re using some sort of front-end application; the only times I’ve used it, it’s been through the API, so I could handle the data in any way I want. It should be trivial to write a program in your favorite scripting language to read the data into memory once and output the plots.
I’m not sure if the API can output animations directly, but you can probably output a bunch of static plots to a directory and then stitch them together with something like Image Magick.
I just recently looked into freeware data visualization software, although not specifically for animation (I was mostly concerned with doing 3d charts that gave me more control than found in, say, Excel or gnuplot). I don’t have time right now to double-check the animation ability, but here’s some that I think might be worth looking at:
None struck me as particularly inutitive to use, and the documentation for 3 and 4 was pretty bad. IIRC, both 1 and 2 do (real-time) animations; neither are very pretty (which is one thing I was particularly concerned with). 3 and 4 are very similar and yield very nice plots, but QtiPlot was far more stable.
Since I run Debian Linux, all were available from the standard repositories (yay, synaptic!). There are a couple others that seemed even more complex that I didn’t look into. Gotta get ready for work, but if you have questions directed my way, I’ll check back later tonight…