Fluorescence microscopy movies

Creating movies of cellular interactions, while working round some installation problems with UNIX tools on Panther. No Fink involved.

  1. Use ImageJ and the Batch Converter plugin to convert 12-bit TIFFs to 8-bit TIFFs.
  2. Install libpng and libtiff.
  3. Install ImageMagick using './configure --without-perl --enable-lzw=yes'
  4. cd into the PerlMagick subdirectory and install using 'perl Makefile.pl' etc. For some reason this worked, but installing as part of the main ImageMagick install didn't.
  5. This is the Perl script I use to merge the images. First image is green, second is red and third is brightfield. Adapt as needed (it's a bit hacky, but it works). Black.tiff is just a plain black image, as I haven't worked out how to create one in PerlMagick yet.
  6. Use Graphic Converter to convert the new folder of images into a QuickTime movie. I use MPEG-4 compression, same size as original image, 8 frames per second, no keyframe.
  7. Play in QuickTime Player, Powerpoint, or whatever you prefer.