[Chimera-users] Creating movies with alpha channel / transparent background

[Elaine Meng]

Hi Martin,
If you have a static image that you were planning to composite the movie over, another possibility is to just use that image as the Chimera background when recording the movie.  You can specify this in the Preferences, category: Background.  See the feature highlight and links therein:

<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/features.html#background>

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

> On Oct 28, 2019, at 1:05 PM, Tom Goddard <goddard at sonic.net> wrote:
> 
> Hi Martin,
> 
>   You can have Chimera save a series of transparent background images using the movie command, for example,
> 
> 	set bgtransp
> 	movie record dir ~/Desktop/test format png ; turn y 1 90 ; wait 90 ; movie stop
> 
> Then you would need to encode the PNG images in ~/Desktop/test into a movie using some encoding program.  I doubt the Chimera "movie encode" command supports any video format that can handle transparent background.  Chimera uses ffmpeg to encode movies and apparently ffmpeg can encode some video formats with transparency, for example, as described here the motion PNG format in .mov can handle transparency
> 
> 	https://stackoverflow.com/questions/644684/turn-image-sequence-into-video-with-transparency
> 
>   Tom
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> On Oct 28, 2019, at 10:06 AM, Martin Textor wrote:
>> 
>> Hello,
>> 
>> I was wondering if it is possible to create movies with a transparent background? I know that it's possible to create images with a transparent background and that the video formats supported by Chimera to encode movies include avi and mov, both of which support an alpha channel as far as I know.
>> 
>> Kind regards,
>> Martin Textor
>> 
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