Making Movies

A simple spin movie can be created using the “video recorder” Toolbar icon:

Otherwise, the movie command can be used to start recording, stop recording, and encode the saved images as a movie file. During recording, the scene can be manipulated interactively and commands can be entered. More often, however, a command file (script) integrating movie with other commands is used instead.

Below are some of the commands likely to be used for scripting continuous motion and other movie content. See also: making images, virtual reality, scripting independent rotation, the ChimeraX morphing highlight, movie tutorials: [2019] [2017], Augmented reality videos with ChimeraX, Mixed reality video recording in ChimeraX

• 2dlabels – add text, symbols, and straight arrows to the display for presentation images and movies
• camera – set mono or stereo viewing and related parameters
• clip – control clipping planes
• cofr – set center of rotation
• coordset – play through frames of a trajectory
• crossfade – interpolate between image frames
• fly – smoothly traverse a series of named views
• morph – morph (interpolate) between atomic structures; create a morph trajectory
• move – translate
• movie – record image frames and assemble them into a movie file
• mseries – display an ordered series of models
• perframe – specify operations to execute at every (or every N^th) display frame
• resfit – show density fit of successive amino acid residues along a chain
• rock – rock back and forth
• roll – rotate continuously
• stop – halt ongoing motions
• torsion – set or report torsion angles (rotate bonds)
• turn – rotate
• view – adjust the view to specified items; save/restore named views
• volume morph – morph (interpolate) between two or more maps
• vr roomCamera – in virtual reality (VR), set up a separate camera view fixed in the VR room coordinates
• vseries – display, analyze, or process an ordered series of maps
• wait – update the display and enforce ordered execution of commands in scripts
• windowsize – set pixel width and height of the graphics window
• wobble – perform a figure-eight rotation
• zoom – change the apparent size of the view

Frame Rate

In ChimeraX, the target or intended graphics frame rate during interactive use is 60 fps (default). The actual frame rate may be lower than the target, depending on computer performance and the complexity of the display, and recording a movie generally slows the process further. However, movie-file playback may be faster or slower than the original process, because the playback frame rate is specified independently when the file is encoded. The command graphics rate (maxFrameRate option) can be used to make the interactive frame rate as similar as possible to the playback rate to preview movie-content scripts. See also: frames terminology