[Chimera-users] A video of 'view dock'

[Elaine Meng]

Dear Amali Guruge,
Yes, you can save the ViewDock playback as a movie file in Chimera.  Although it’s not directly integrated with movie recording, there are at least two different ways you could do it, “A” and “B” below.

General information on recording movies in Chimera:
<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/movies.html>

(A) Use the Movie Recorder tool, graphical interface (menu:  Tools… Utilities… Movie Recorder).  You will see there is a button to start recording, and after you start recording, it changes to a button to stop recording, and then to save to a movie file.  In this case, you would have to try to synchronize everything manually by clicking start and stop buttons on the Movie Recorder and ViewDock movie dialogs, or just play the ViewDock movie continuously and try to click start and stop buttons on Movie Recorder at the right time.  The disadvantage of this approach is that it can be difficult to click the buttons at the right time.  Another issue is that the frame rate (how fast the graphics are redrawn) in interactive Chimera  is faster by default than in an encoded movie file, so you might want to slow down the interactive rate so that the speed will be the same as in the resulting movie file, for example with the command:  set maxFrameRate 25
<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/ContributedSoftware/recorder/recorder.html>

(B) Use a Chimera command script.  The ligands in viewdock are submodels, so to show each one would be something like commands:

set maxFrameRate 25
~modeldisp #0; modeldisp #0.1; wait 15
~modeldisp #0; modeldisp #0.2; wait 15
~modeldisp #0; modeldisp #0.3; wait 15
~modeldisp #0; modeldisp #0.4; wait 15
...

That would be if the ligands were open as model 0.  You would use a different number if they are open as a different model, e.g. #1 instead of #0.  Each line hides all ligands and then displays a specific one for a specific number of wait frames (use a bigger number for slower playback).  When your script shows what you want to show in your movie, you could put a “movie record” command at the top and movie stop and encode commands at the bottom and re-run it to create your movie file.  As in (A), you might want to set maxFrameRate so that what you see matches the speed in the output movie file.  See the documentation for “movie” and other movie-related commands for their options and syntax.
<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/midas/movie.html>
<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/movies.html#moviecommands>

I hope this helps,
Elaine
----------
Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D. 
UCSF Computer Graphics Lab (Chimera team) and Babbitt Lab
Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
University of California, San Francisco

> On Aug 9, 2015, at 4:34 AM, Amali Guruge <amaligg2010 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear All,
> Can we save the movie play in 'view dock' option? 
> Can anyone help me?
> Thank you.