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

[Elaine Meng]

Hi Gustaf,
I believe it’s not related to frame rate, but that you just need to “wait 500” (or however many frames you are showing) after the coordset command, otherwise it may stop recording before playback occurs.  E.g. something like

coordset #0 1,500;  wait 500

You could have additional wait frames before and after trajectory playback, if you want.

The “wait” command documentation mentions that several commands including “coordset” require explicit “wait” commands with the appropriate numbers of frames (easy to overlook this, however, as there is a lot of documentation):
<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/midas/wait.html>

I hope this helps,
Elaine
-----
Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D.                       
UCSF Chimera(X) team
Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
University of California, San Francisco

> On May 29, 2018, at 7:38 AM, Gustaf Olsson <gustaf.olsson at lnu.se> wrote:
> 
> 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