[Chimera-users] Recording a movie of an MD simulation

[Gustaf Olsson]

Hello everyone

First time posting, looking for some advice. I have an MD simulation that was produced with the AMBER software package and I want to record a movie (MP4) file of the simulation. 

I wanted to use a CMD file and not go through the GUI since this would be a step in a series of steps and I was also hoping to perform some “in movie” modifications to the structure though I quickly ran into a huge issue, the frame rate.

So basically i tried something like this:

    movie record size 3840,2160 format png supersample 3
    coordset #0 1,-1
    wait 10
    movie stop
    movie encode output /Users/guolaa/Desktop/Arbete/Konferenser/MIP2018/Presentation/myMovieFolder/mdSimulationBox.mp4 format mp4 quality highest

>From this I received what looked like a single frame of “movie”. This seemed very strange to me since I assumed that this would be 500 PNG images resulting in a 20 second movie at 25 fps. It seems I’m missing something in the process since MD iterations, frames and frame-rates does not seem to match up.

I’ve gone through the documentation regarding maxFramerate, movie, coordset and so forth and I can’t work out a decent strategy. I have 500 iterations (MD-frames) loaded, I want to record a smooth 10 seconds (-ish) long MP4 movie file covering the entire range of MD-iterations (first frame to last frame though not necessarily every frame in between) and I want to do this in a CMD script and not using the GUI menu system since I plan to do more things while recording at some point (manipulating representations).

Thank you in advance for any input, best regards
// Gustaf