This is just a demonstrative website, and it's not meant to precisely enumerate features of our software or lists of our services. If you are interested in our products or services, or if you just want more technical or commercial informations about them, please feel free to contact us: we'll appreciate your feedback and we'll be glad to answer your questions.
features
some of the features implemented in F.AR.:
- Flexibility
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F.AR. can render weather graphics for a variety of media: videos for broadcasting, wheather maps for the web interface embeddable in any website, imagery at any resolution for print or web, PDFs for newspapers and magazines.
- Vector graphics
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One important feature of F.AR. is to draw pixel-perfect, fluid, coherent and clear animations of contour lines and particels: we think these graphic representations are perfect for weather data, and are easily readable from any target of audience
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With contour lines we can visualize all the main weather variables: temperature, pressure, clouds, rainfall and snow, while particels are perfect for winds and sea waves
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All color scales are customizable (creating custom legendas), as well as lines width, lines shadow, and labels with numeric values of the weather variables
- Symbols graphics
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F.AR. also support the classic weather symbols placed on maps
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Different set of symbols are available out of the box: bitmap animated symbols, or vector animated symbols
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Create custom sets of symbols (static or animated) with your preferred graphic tools, and then import them in F.AR. and use them in your videos
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Create custom markers with weather infromation and place it on maps in your videos: in each marker you can show a location name, a temperature (temperature text color can vary based on the temperature value), etc.
- Video formats
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Any resolution, any framerate and any codec supported for the rendered video files
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Video editing: design your videos timeline, with multiple layers, keyframes to interpolate animations, and custom objects to visualize all different kind of wather graphics
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Import from After Effects™ or any other video editing software: just export your graphics footages as a sequence on PNG frames, and F.AR. will import them as a separate layer in your video timeline. You can design your video graphics with the tools of your choice, and then import them in F.AR. and just add layers with weather graphics maps or symbols
- Data formats
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F.AR. natively imports weather data in GRIB format, such as data freely available from NOAA (the american National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
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F.AR. also support GRIB files (type 1 or type 2) from any other data model, or generic CSV files, or even external APIs to fetch data from. You can also use different data models in the same video
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You can schedule data downloads with a different timing (cron), different geographic bounding box and different data layers (and data levels) for each data source you want
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F.AR. can visualiza any data variable:
- Rendering engine
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The F.AR. rendering engine implements many modern rendering techniques, like motion blur, antialiasing, layers and transparencies, audio layers, in/out fading for audio and video layers, timeline keyframes smooth interpolation
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Each poperty of a layer can be animated: size and position of the layer relative to the frame, its opacity, and more. And also each property of a weather map can be animated: the greographic point the map looks at, the zoom level of the map, and more. The rendering engine takes care of all the time interpolation necessary to make all these properties smoothly change across frames of the animation.
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Drawing of the contour lines is implemented with a proprietary algorithm, which extends the marching squares technique, adding the logic to close the contour lines, to smooth them into bezier lines, and to draw each line with its own fill color.
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Given that F.AR. generates outputs for different media such as video, paper and web, using the very same engine to generate output for all these different media, grants that all outputs are perfectly equal, offering to our customers a coherent style across all needed media.
- Cartography
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Various prerendered cartographies are available in F.AR. out of the box: from minimal solid colors, to detailed physical maps with orographies, reliefs and shadows
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All our cartographies cover the whole globe, at a high zoom level
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If you need a totally customized cartography, we have tools and skills to produce it: we can apply custom color gradients to orography heights, custom colors to land and sea, and totally customize graphic appearence of topological labels, streets, borders, and any other element you may need in your maps.
- Automation
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Tasks management: choose when each video has to be automatically rendered (standard cron-like syntax supported)
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FTP delivery: after each video has been rendered, it's possible to automatically send it via FTP to the customer
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Each rendered video can be passed to a postprocessing pipeline: so you can generate different output formats and resolutions from the same original video, or generate different versions personalized with different logos, or different start/end clips
- Scalability
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The F.AR. rendering engine is a distributed and multithreaded application: that means it can be deployed on a render farm constituted by a cluster of servers (physical or virtual machines), and on each server it will use all the available CPUs.
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The frames of a video are rendered in parallel on each server in the farm, and also in parallel on each CPU of each server. That means the more servers you add to the farm, the more quickly videos will be rendered. Data crunching necessary to draw weather data is huge, but with the F.AR. scalable architecture is possibile to provision the right rendering infrastructure to cover any customer request