Movie Recorder Movie Recorder icon

Movie Recorder captures image frames from Chimera and assembles them into movies. See Making Movies for information on developing movie content (often in the form of command files) and troubleshooting problems in PowerPoint.

There are several ways to start Movie Recorder, a tool in the Utilities category. Movie Recorder is also implemented as the command movie. Movies of trajectories can be recorded with MD Movie.

The window size should be adjusted as desired before recording is started. The window can be resized manually, or with the command windowsize, or by selecting a preset from the Movie Options. Any preset specification or change in Frame Options should be done before recording is started. On certain platforms, other windows should not overlap the Chimera graphics window during recording (details...). This is not an issue when raytracing is used.

On the Movie Recorder dialog, clicking Record initiates frame capture and changes the button to Stop. Clicking Stop halts frame capture. Frame capture can be restarted by clicking Record again. This can be repeated until the desired segments have been saved. Reset resets the frame count to zero and (unless Save images on Reset has been turned on) deletes the frames.

When the desired frames have been saved, the next step is to specify the movie Output file name/location and Output format:

Clicking Make movie initiates the process of encoding the saved frames into a movie file. During encoding, the button changes to Cancel movie, which can be clicked to halt the process. When the movie is fully assembled, a reset will occur unless Reset after encode has been turned off.


UCSF Computer Graphics Laboratory / July 2009