Chimera Commands Index

Usage:
movie action options

Movie is the command-line implementation of Movie Recorder, which captures image frames from Chimera and assembles them into a movie file. See also: making movies, movie-related commands, tips on preparing images

One of the following action keywords must be specified:

The action keyword cannot be truncated, and case is important. Actions may have specific options.

Options

All specifications are optional, and the order of specification is not important. Option keywords can be truncated, and their case is not important. Default values are indicated with bold. A vertical bar "|" designates mutually exclusive values.

Options for movie record:

directory image-directory
Where image files should be saved; the default varies by platform.
pattern filename-pattern
The filename-pattern is a string to use when naming the image files; the default is chimovie_xxxx-*, where xxxx is replaced by random characters and * is replaced by the frame number (for example, 00001, 00002, etc.). Any specified filename-pattern should include one and only one *, which will be replaced by the frame number.
fformat jpeg | png | ppm
The format of saved image files. Regardless of which format is specified, however, frames are always saved in the png format when raytracing is used.
supersample N
Whether to increase the image quality over what is displayed on the screen. N is the number of pixels sampled in the X and Y dimensions for each pixel in the final saved image; N>1 specifies generating initial images larger than the window and sampling them down to the final size. Useful values range from 1 (no supersampling) to 4 (4x4 supersampling), with 3 recommended when supersampling is done. In addition, a value of 0 can be used to indicate onscreen rather than offscreen rendering, without supersampling. Increasing N increases smoothness but also calculation time. Another potential disadvantage of over-supersampling is that lines such as silhouette edges or hydrogen-bond representations in the final images may become unacceptably thin because there is a limit to how wide they can be in the initial images. Smoothness is also affected by other settings.
size width,height
Generate images at the specified pixel width and height by offscreen rendering. This option allows creating movies with image dimensions larger than the Chimera window; if size is not given, the dimensions of the Chimera graphics window will be used. If the specified aspect ratio (the ratio of width to height) does not match that of the graphics window, the movie will show more or less of the scene vertically than is visible in the graphics window.
raytrace true | false
Whether to raytrace with POV-Ray rather than saving the contents of the Chimera graphics window. Raytraced images include fancier effects like shadows, but take longer to compute. Raytracing parameters can be adjusted in the POV-Ray Options preferences (see balancing time requirements and results).

Options for movie crossfade:

frames N
Number of frames in the crossfade transition (default 25), a linear interpolation from the preceding image frame to the image frame specified right after the crossfade. The crossfade transition will not be shown during recording, but will be in the resulting movie.

Options for movie duplicate:

frames N
Number of times to duplicate the next specified image frame (default 25). The duplicates will not be shown during recording, but will be in the resulting movie. For example, the following command would give 16 additional frames identical to the image frame preceding the command:
movie duplicate frames 15; wait 1

Options for movie reset:

resetMode clear | keep
The default behavior (clear) is to delete the image files when a reset occurs; however, one should keep the files if planning to use them for some other purpose, such as movie encoding with a different program.

Options for movie encode:

mformat avi | mov | mpeg | mp2 | mp4
The mformat option specifies the output movie file format:
output movie-pathname
The movie-pathname is the name and location to use for the movie file (default chimera_movie.mov in the current directory).
bitrate rate
The playback bit rate relates to movie quality and file size. A higher bit rate (at a given window size and frame rate) gives better movie quality but also a larger file size. The bitrate option indicates that the movie should be encoded to play back at a constant rate in Kbits/s. (The default is a variable rate, see qscale.) Generally, a playback rate of 200 Kbits/s is low, 1000 medium, and 6000 high.
qscale factor
The qscale option indicates that the movie should be encoded to play back with a variable bit rate. The quality factor is an integer that can range from 1 (highest quality and highest data rates) to 31 (lowest quality). By default, a movie will be encoded to play back with a variable bit rate corresponding to a quality factor of 8. If both qscale and bitrate options are given, variable bit rate encoding will be used.
framerate fps
The frame rate is the rate of playback in terms of image frames. The frame rate fps is an integer and defaults to 25 frames/s.
buffersize size
Specification of a buffer size is optional. The units are Kbytes.
roundtrip true|false
Whether to include the frames in reverse order as the second half of the movie.
preset vcd | svcd | dvd
The preset option indicates that a built-in set of parameters should be used: Using a preset will resize the graphics window and override other specifications of the listed parameters.
resetMode clear | keep | none
By default, a reset will occur when movie encoding is complete. The resetMode values clear and keep are as described above, while none specifies that no reset should occur; none should be used when one may want to re-encode the movie using the same saved frames.