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## Choosing movie generation method

After you've specified all of your movie options, VisIt prompts you how you would like your movie made. At this point, you can click the Finish button to make VisIt start generating your movie. You can change how VisIt creates your movie by clicking a different movie generation method on the Save movie wizard's fifth screen, shown in Figure figure.

Figure 8

The default option for movie creation allows VisIt to use your current VisIt session to make your movies. This has the advantage that it uses your current compute engine and allocated processors, which makes movie generation start immediately. When you use this movie generation method, VisIt will launch its command line interface (CLI) and execute Python movie-making scripts in order to generate your movie. This means that you have both the VisIt GUI and CLI controlling the viewer. If you use this movie generation method, you will be able to watch your movie as it is generated. You can track the movie's progress using the Movie progress dialog, shown in Figure figure. The downside to using your currently allocated processors is that movie generation takes over your VisIt session until the movie is complete. If you want to regain control over your VisIt session, effectively cancelling the movie generation process, you can click the Movie progress dialog's Cancel button.

Figure 9

The second movie generation method will cause VisIt to save out a session file containing every detail about your visualization so it can be recreated by a new instance of VisIt. This method works well if you want to create a movie without sacrificing your current VisIt session but you cannot watch the movie as it is generated and you may have to wait for the second instance's compute engine to be scheduled to run. The last movie generation option simply makes VisIt display the command that you would have to type at a command prompt in order to make VisIt generate a movie of your current visualizations.