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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

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


UCSF Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization, and Informatics / July 2022