Make a movie with pcolor without getframe

Question

I have a simulation running in MATLAB and I want to make a movie from the frames. There are more than 4000 frames at least 1600x1600 in size. Each frame is a 2D matrix. I can visualize them with pcolor and make a movie using getframe. But as the size is huge and the simulation is running overnight, I will run into alot of problems with screen savers, etc. Is there any better way to do this in MATLAB? Solutions with other softwares is also OK.

Answer 1

Using the link provided in @Bee answer and some tinkering the problem is solved like this:

aviobj=VideoWriter(filename);
open(aviobj);
hFig=figure('Visible','Off');

for loop comes here
    cla

    %All Drawing stuff    

    img = hardcopy(hFig, '-dzbuffer', '-r0');
    writeVideo(aviobj, im2frame(img));
end
close(aviobj)

Note that it is using the VideoWriter instead of deprecated avifile and addframe and it does the rendering in memory not on disk so it's reasonably fast.

Answer 2

Right before drawing the picture with pcolor(), try creating a figure that is invisible using h = figure('visible', 'off'); and use addframe(avi_file, h); to add a frame to the avi coming from the invisible figure. More detailed discussions can be found at Render MATLAB figure in memory

Update: it seems that there is no way to get a frame using getframe() inside a headless Matlab so options using VideoWriter and movie2avi will not work. If somebody has been successful with this, please correct me in the comments section.