Processing: MovieMaker gotchas in Eclipse

I haven't touched my Processing sketches for a while, and got lots of weird errors while trying to render a video using the built-in MovieMaker object.

Exception in thread "Animation Thread" java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: quicktime.QTSession.Gestalt(I[I)S
Caused by: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /System/Library/Java/Extensions/libQTJNative.jnilib:  no suitable image found.  Did find:  /System/Library/Java/Extensions/libQTJNative.jnilib: no matching architecture in universal wrapper

The above error was fixed by switching the JVM that Eclipse was using in the "Run..." configuration. On my Macbook, I simply switched to an alternate JVM 1.5, and it got rid of the problem:

If you get the following error, you need to delete the previous rendered movie, or use some sort of timestamp to automatically name each new movie:

The movie file already exists.  Please delete it first.

Here's a little timestamp code I wrote to help prevent file name conflicts:

_timestamp = "" + String.valueOf( p.year() ) + "-" + String.valueOf( p.month() ) + "-" + String.valueOf( p.day() ) + "-" + String.valueOf(p.hour()) + "-" + String.valueOf(p.minute()) + "-" + String.valueOf(p.second());
  
_mm = new MovieMaker( p, p.width, p.height, "output/render-"+_timestamp+".mov", _framesPerSecond, MovieMaker.ANIMATION, MovieMaker.HIGH );

A stupid user-error error message I got was due to accidentally starting 2 instances of MovieMaker. Upon calling MovieMaker.finish(), I got this error:

quicktime.std.StdQTException[QTJava:7.6.6g],-2014=invalidDuration,QT.vers:7668000

Some other issues I've run into:
* Certain codecs won't be installed on your machine. For example, I can't use MovieMaker.H264, but I can use MovieMaker.ANIMATION
* After rendering a movie, Quicktime can have trouble playing it back, especially with certain codecs. My movies look blank. A workaround is to open and export the video from Quicktime Pro in order to view it.

Finally, something I've been doing with all my Processing sketches is to add the following VM Arguments to the Run Configuration. This helps avoid running out of memory and to run in 32-bit mode (required for certain operations):

-d32
-Xmx1024M
-Xms1024M