Movie Recorder Movie Recorder icon

Movie Recorder captures image frames from Chimera and assembles them into a movie file. See also: Animation, making movies, tips on preparing images

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.

Any desired adjustments in the window size, Frame Options, or Movie preferences should be made before recording is started. The window can be resized manually or with the command windowsize. 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 counter to zero and deletes the individual images (unless the Movie preferences have been set to keep them).

When the desired frames have been saved, the next step is to specify the movie Output file name and location. Clicking Make movie initiates encoding the saved frames into a movie file. During encoding, the button changes to Cancel movie, which can be clicked to halt the process.


UCSF Computer Graphics Laboratory / January 2012