Many times, you'll need to present your animation to others. Rather than playing the animation in the display of the ArcGIS application, you can create a video of your animation by exporting to an Audio Video Interleaved (.avi) or QuickTime (.mov) file. This is especially useful when working with large datasets where the refresh rate can be slow, and it enables you to share your animations with others. Videos can take time to create, especially with large datasets, but once created, the video runs quickly.

The video will play too quickly with the currently set frame duration of 0.1. Set the Frame duration on the Animation Controls dialog box to 1.0 second.

You'll only export the time range from 1950 - 2000. Check Play only from and type "17" to "21" frames. Click Options to collapse the Animation Controls dialog.

Ensure that the graph is large enough to show all the state names, but small enough so that all the counties and the time text can be seen in the display.

Click the Animation drop-down arrow and click Export to Video. Navigate to your Animation in ArcMap folder and type "My_Population_Change" in the File name text box.

Leave the default in the Save as type drop-down list as AVI (*.avi). Click Options.

The Enable Off-Screen recording option is useful if you want to continue working while the animation is exporting. With the exception of graphs, windows opened on top of the ArcMap application will not appear in the exported video. The graph you created will be exported and included in the video file if you check Enable Off-Screen recording. Check Enable Off-Screen recording and click OK.

Click Export on the Export animation as video dialog box. The Video Compression dialog box opens. Click the Compressor drop-down arrow and choose a compressor.

Compressor/decompressors (codecs) are third party software, which greatly reduce file size while maintaining optimum quality. There are usually different codecs on different machines, depending on the types and versions of video creation, editing and viewing software installed.

For Microsoft's AVI ((Audio Video Interleaved), Full Frames, Uncompressed is arguably the best codec, giving a high quality video output. The resulting video size on disk could be very large however, since there is no compression applied. Of the codecs that apply compression, Cinepak Codec by Radius and Microsoft Video 1 have been used with good results.

For Apple's QT (QuickTime), most of the QT codecs listed should work well since QT has regular upgrades. Cinepak, Sorenson Video, H.264 (noted for its high compression), and MPEG-4 have all been used with success.

Note that you can export animations from layout view in ArcMap, enabling you to export not only the display and the graph but also layout elements, such as the legend for the data in the display, a north arrow, scale bar, and so on.

Since it will take a number of minutes to create the video, click Cancel and navigate on disk to your Animation in ArcMap folder. Double-click Population_Change.avi to play a video that has previously been created.

Click File and click Save to save the map document. Click File and click Exit to exit the ArcMap application.