Struggling with hold on and hold off placements

I'm trying to animate a moving pendulum for one period, but I'm having trouble using hold on and hold off. I'm trying to make it so that my axes options are retained, but not the plotting of each point. As a result, my 'pendulums' are all stacked on top of each other and I'm not sure how to fix it.

L = 2 ;
g = 9.81 ;
Theta_0 = pi/3 ;

% Equations for pendulum
p = 2*pi*sqrt(L/g)
t = 0:(1/30):2.837 ;

Theta = Theta_0 * cos(sqrt(g/L) * t) ;
x = L * sin(Theta) ;
y = L * (1 - cos(Theta)) ;

figure(1)
hold on
axis equal
axis([-2,2,-2,2]);
for i = 1:length(t)
    p1 = plot([0, x(i)], [2, y(i)], '-', 'LineWidth', 6, 'Color', 'k'); 
    p2 = plot(x(i), y(i), 'b.', 'Markersize', 70);
    drawnow

end

The result of the for loop is this:

I then thought 'maybe it's just showing every frame on top of each other, and it'll look normal once I put it into a video.

So I did this:

myVideo = VideoWriter('pen2')
open(myVideo)

figure(1)
hold on
axis equal
axis([-2,2,-2,2]);
for i = 1:length(t)
    p1 = plot([0, x(i)], [2, y(i)], '-', 'LineWidth', 6, 'Color', 'k'); 
    p2 = plot(x(i), y(i), 'b.', 'Markersize', 70);
    frame = getframe ;
    writeVideo(myVideo, 1)
    
end

close(myVideo)
implay pen2.avi

But all that does is open an avi file that's completely blank (see below)

Any help would be greatly appreciated, even though this seems like a simple task I've been working on it for quite some time.

Thanks!

Answer 1

[Simon Chan]

How about this?

L = 2 ;
g = 9.81 ;
Theta_0 = pi/3 ;
% Equations for pendulum
p = 2*pi*sqrt(L/g);
t = 0:(1/30):2.837 ;
Theta = Theta_0 * cos(sqrt(g/L) * t) ;
x = L * sin(Theta) ;
y = L * (1 - cos(Theta)) ;
figure(1)
ax = gca;
p1 = plot(ax,NaN, NaN, '-', 'LineWidth', 6, 'Color', 'k');
hold(ax,'on');
p2 = plot(ax,NaN, NaN, 'b.', 'Markersize', 70);
axis(ax,'equal');
axis(ax,'off');                                             % Optional
axis(ax,[-2,2,-2,2]);
for i = 1:length(t)
    set(p1,'XData',[0, x(i)], 'YData',[2, y(i)]);
    set(p2,'XData',x(i),'YData',y(i));
    drawnow;
end
hold(ax,'off');

[Isabelle Davies]

Holy sh*t it worked! Thank you so much! This has literally made me cry so many times

[Simon Chan]

Great, please accept the answer if you find it useful. Thank you.