Making plotting/videos faster

Hello! I'm working a project that takes laser scans, transforms them to lay on top of one another using a combination of world-view and icp, and then takes those transformed matrices of data (no processes being done to the data, a few minor proccesses (adding/multiplication of values to report in the graph)) and plotting them in one frame.

Because eventually I want all scans plotted on top of each other, I simply decided to leave the plot "hold on" while the while loop goes scan by scan. I'm using videoWriter to make an animation of the scans.

However, it is taking extremely long to plot and write the scans to a video -- upwards of 30minutes (JUST for the plotting/video) for an 1000 scan matrix. Should it be taking this long? Is there any way that I can make the process go faster? (i.e. memory control?)

I can post example code if that helps as well.

Thanks!

[Jaden]

It also seems to be getting progressively slower, if that helps at all.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

Unfortunately, MATLAB graphics slow down a lot when there are a lot of data points visible.

I would expect that you should be able to improve performance by making each plot invisible after you finish it, and then at the end, turn them all visible. It still might not be fast, though.