We need to display a lot of graphs within the documentary. The best would be if there is a common design between all the graphs in the same video.
Since we are doing video editing, the best would be if the graphs themselves are animated (e.g. a curve going up and up, like the growth in population, oil and energy consumption, etc.)
We'll try to list the different possibilities.
http://www.blender.org/ Blender is a powerful, cross-platform 3D modeling software. It also has video timeline editing tools. We could use it to create 3D animated graphs. But the software is tough to learn at first. Check some Open Source, animated movies created with Blender.
See the wiki page Video editing with Blender.
The GD library is a well known graphic library available for PHP and other programming languages. We can easily use the PHP image functions to create a small ad-hoc software allowing us to create the 2D graphs we need. Those graphs can be easily animated by programing a timeline in PHP.
This is a much easier solution than Blender, and some sleek graphics can be created fairly easily.
http://php.net/gd
http://www.libgd.org/
http://www.nyphp.org/content/presentations/GDintro/gd1.php A complete tutorial on using lib GD.
Some libraries are more suitable for creating graphs for the web. Maybe some would be needed for this web site.
The following are all free, open source software.
http://teethgrinder.co.uk/open-flash-chart/ Very sleek flash-based library.
http://graphist.sourceforge.net/ simple web-based graph plotter.
http://phplot.sourceforge.net/ mature library for dynamic graphs.
| Project | Summary | Status | Priority | Category | Last updated | Assigned to |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blender | consolidate blender wiki pages | active | normal | task | 29 weeks 3 days |