Movie Recorder

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:

• MPEG-1 [.mpg]
• MPEG-2 [.mpg]
• MPEG-4 [.mp4]
• AVI MSMPEG-4v2 [.avi]
• Quicktime [.mov] (default, unless a preset has been chosen)

• Frame Options
  • Directory - image file location
  • Filename pattern - string for naming image files
  • Format - image file format (regardless of which format is specified, however, frames are always saved in the PNG format when raytracing is used)
    • JPEG [.jpeg]
    • PNG [.png]
    • PPM [.ppm] (default)
  • Supersample (off by default) - whether to increase the image quality over what is displayed on the screen. The supersampling level is the number of pixels sampled in the X and Y dimensions for each pixel in the final saved image; supersampling at levels greater than 1x1 entails generating initial images larger than the window and sampling them down to the final size. Activating this option (even at 1x1) allows the subdivision quality to be adjusted automatically. Higher values increase smoothness but also calculation time.
    • 1x1
    • 2x2
    • 3x3 - recommended when supersampling is used
    • 4x4
    • 5x5
    • 6x6
  • Raytrace with POV-Ray (off by default) - 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. The adjacent Options button opens the POV-Ray Options preferences (see balancing time requirements and results).
  • Save images on Reset (off by default) - whether to keep individual image files when a reset occurs

• Movie Options
  • Bit rate controls quality and file size:
    • Constant bit rate (Kbits/s) (default) - encode the movie to play back with a constant data rate. Generally, 200 Kbits/s is a low rate, 1000 medium, and 6000 high (default 2000). Increasing the bit rate increases movie quality and file size for a given resolution (window size) and frame rate. At a given bit rate, a larger window and/or a higher frame rate correspond to lower movie quality.
    • Variable bit rate. Q (1-31) - encode the movie to play back with a variable data rate specified with a quality factor, Q. The quality factor can range from 1 (highest quality and highest data rates) to 31 (lowest quality) (default 5). Some movie players may not handle variable bit rates correctly, yielding uneven playback.
  • Frames per second (default 25) - movie playback rate in terms of image frames
  • Buffer size (Kbytes) (default 200)
  • Play forward then backward (off by default) - whether to include the frames in reverse order as the second half of the movie
  • Set standard format - whether to use a preset with a built-in set of parameters:
    • VCD (Video Compact Disc) - MPEG-1, resolution 352x240, bit rate 1150 Kbits/s, buffer size 40 Kbytes
    • SVCD (Super Video Compact Disc) - MPEG-2, resolution 480x480, bit rate 2040 Kbits/s, buffer size 224 Kbytes
    • DVD (Digital Versatile/Video Disc) - MPEG-2, resolution 720x480, bit rate 6000 Kbits/s, buffer size 224 Kbytes
    Choosing a preset will resize the graphics window and adjust other parameters accordingly. Parameters can be readjusted after a preset has been chosen, however.