Fractal eXtreme: Zoom Movies

Zoom Movies

What are zoom movies?

One of the unique and wonderful features of Fractal eXtreme is its ability to efficiently create zoom movies. These visually stunning movies can show enormous magnification changes as the viewer zooms down into the unimaginable depths of fractal images, in a smooth and dazzling manner.

Zoom movies that encompass a magnification range greater than the scale of the universe - from electron to distant quasar - can be easily created. Watching the continually changing forms while trying to comprehend the change in scale can be mind boggling. Alternately, just lean back and watch the eye candy go floating by.

This animated GIF gives a rough idea of what Fractal eXtreme's zoom movies can look like. When rendered in Fractal eXtreme and played back with the Fractal eXtreme Movie Player, these zoom movies play back much more smoothly, can be dozens of times longer and much higher resolution, without taking up any more space on disk than this animated GIF.

You can find many examples on YouTube, such as this one, this one, this channel, and much more. Despite the video compression artifacts these movies look quite stunning, and when you view your own movies on your computer the quality can be far better - absolutely perfect.

Zoom movies are easily created in Fractal eXtreme by zooming in to an interesting area, selecting Make Zoom Movies and then clicking OK. They render very quickly, take very little space to store, and play back well on even the slowest of PCs.

For information on the features of the latest version of the zoom movie player go here.

How do I make zoom movies?

Fractal zoom movies can only be created with Fractal eXtreme. You can download the free trial version and test it out for fifteen days. If you enjoy making home movies about the infinte then you can unlock Fractal eXtreme, instantly, over the Internet.

Zoom movies are just one of the powerful and unique features of Fractal eXtreme. For more information on what makes this product special, go here.

Where do I get the zoom movie player?

We have many zoom movies available for download, from this site and others. In order to play these movies you need the zoom movie player. You can download it as part of the complete Fractal eXtreme trial package.

Where do I get zoom movies?

Some of the movies below are described in terms of how many 'zooms' deep they are. We use zooms rather than magnification because it avoids the ridiculously large numbers that you are otherwise forced to use. A single zoom is a doubling of magnification. Ten zooms increases the magnification by a thousand times, and forty zooms increases the magnification by about one trillion times. 140 zooms is enough magnification to make an electron the size of the visible universe. The movie that reaches out to 1023 zooms has magnified the original Mandelbrot set by far more than that - more than ten to the 300th power. Don't think about it, just enjoy them.

You will need to right-click on the files and select "Save Link As" or "Save Target As" to download these files.

Movies available

For the explanation of this next set of zoom movies see the really deep page.

This next set of zoom movies demonstrates the patterns and differences around the Mandelbrot set. For more of an explanation, visit the Mandelbrot Atlas.

Other sites hosting zoom movies

The best place to find Fractal eXtreme zoom movies is on YouTube or other video hosting sites.

Technical details

Fractal eXtreme only stores 'key frames' when recording zoom movies, which reduces the computation time and storage requirements by ten to fifty times. When playing the movies back intermediate frames are generated. The results can be visually indistinguishable from what you would get by calculating every frame - but much more compact. Additionally, you can change the zoom speed when playing back the movie, and extra frames will be generated as needed.

Because multiple key frames can be used simultaneously, and because there are always extra key frames available, zoom movies can be substantially magnified without loss of quality. The center of the image remains crisp and sharp as later key frames are automatically used.

If you want to make zoom movies available for download from your website you need to make sure that people can download them in 'binary' mode. If the zoom movies get downloaded in 'text' mode then they may be corrupted and will not play properly. One way to guarantee proper downloading is to use an FTP server rather than just an HTTP (web page) server. If that is not available then you can put the zoom movie .fxz file into a .zip file, as web browsers know that .zip files must be downloaded in binary mode.

Because the zoom movie player can save the zoom movie playback to an AVI file you can quickly create a zoom movie, then render out as many frames as you want, and then insert the AVI file into a video editing program. This lets you efficiently record extremely high quality zoom movies for sharing in standard video formats.