MATLAB: Changing width of color bar and re-positioning it in movie frames

color bar width and positionmovie frames

Hello. I have data I'm using to make a movie from surface plots. I'm trying to add a fixed color bar with a width about 1/2 times the default, but adjusting the width causes the color bar to overlap each plot. My code only ends up correcting this for the first frame, but does not correct it for the rest of them. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
 set(gcf,'visible','off')
 mov(pf) = struct('cdata',[],'colormap',[]);
for p = 1:pf
    surf(X(:,:,p),Y(:,:,p),P(:,:,p));
    grid('off')
    xlabel('x(m)');
    ylabel('y(m)');
    zlabel('|Grad(P)| (Pa/m)');
    axis([x0 xf y0 yf z0 zf])
    titleInfo = cell(3,1);
    titleInfo{1,1} = '|GradP| vs x and y';
    titleInfo{2,1} = ['U = ',num2str(u,'%3.2f'),' (m/s)'];
    titleInfo{3,1} = ['t = ',num2str(t(p),'%3.2f'),' (s)'];
    title(titleInfo);
    view(50,45)
    colormap jet
    caxis manual
    caxis([z0 zf])
    *cbar = colorbar;
    ax = gca;
    axpos = ax.Position;
    cpos = cbar.Position;
    cpos(3) = 0.5*cpos(3);
    cbar.Position = cpos;
    ax.Position = axpos;*
    mov(p) = getframe(gcf);
end
close('all')
set(gcf,'visible','on')

Best Answer

I think that the colorbar and axes positions aren't really stable at the point that you're changing the Position. Possibly because the figure is Visible='off', but I'm not sure about that. You can probably get things to be a bit more stable if you insert a drawnow after call the colorbar.
But, when I'm doing an animation like this, I usually pull the plotting function out of the loop and use the returned handle to update the data. The reason for this is that then all of the axes positioning is only happening once, not every frame. That tends to make things a lot more stable.
For your example, that might look something like this:
set(gcf,'visible','off')
mov(pf) = struct('cdata',[],'colormap',[]);
% Initialization
h = surf(X(:,:,1),Y(:,:,1),P(:,:,1));
grid('off')
xlabel('x(m)');
ylabel('y(m)');
zlabel('|Grad(P)| (Pa/m)');
axis([x0 xf y0 yf z0 zf])
view(50,45)
colormap jet
caxis manual
caxis([z0 zf])
cbar = colorbar;
ax = gca;
axpos = ax.Position;
cpos = cbar.Position;
cpos(3) = 0.5*cpos(3);
cbar.Position = cpos;
ax.Position = axpos;
% Animation
for p = 1:pf
  h.XData = X(:,:,p);
  h.YData = Y(:,:,p);
  h.ZData = P(:,:,;);
  titleInfo = cell(3,1);
  titleInfo{1,1} = '|GradP| vs x and y';
  titleInfo{2,1} = ['U = ',num2str(u,'%3.2f'),' (m/s)'];
  titleInfo{3,1} = ['t = ',num2str(t(p),'%3.2f'),' (s)'];
  title(titleInfo);
  mov(p) = getframe(gcf);
end
close('all')
set(gcf,'visible','on')
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