From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed Jul 10 2013 - 15:30:32 CDT

Hi,
  There's no need to write any special movie making scripts if one wants
to use a different program for the movie compression rather than VideoMach...

The existing movie maker plugin will allow the user to take the rendered
frames and compress them with their favorite movie encoder by simply
un-checking the "Delete image files" button in the "Movie Settings" menu.
By un-checking the image deletion option, the movie maker plugin will
leave all of the rendered frames in the working directory, and the user
can then run whatever movie encoder they like on the set of images.

This method retains all of the other benefits of the movie maker plugin
such as support for built-in ray tracing etc, and you don't have to do
any special scripting.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 03:01:07PM -0500, Josh Vermaas wrote:
> Hi Hunter,
>
> Technically the tutorial isn't lying. Linux is free. :D
>
> On a more useful note, if you are just looking to do a simple trajectory
> movie on windows (go through each frame and render a frame), something
> like the following should work, but will take some TCL scripting and
> external programs. Basically, you'll need to render an image for each
> frame in your movie, and then combine them. That is what the movie-maker
> plugin does for you, but on windows it requires VideoMach to stitch
> together the frames into a movie. Instead, you can just make a purpose
> built script to spit out each individual frame, and use an external
> program to combine the frames.
>
> #Pick a size for the images. This is more or less arbitrary, and depends
> on what looks good. The images will be as big as your OpenGL window
> display resize 600 480
> set totalframes [molinfo top get numframes]
> for { set f 0 } {$f < $totalframes} {incr f} {
> #Goto the right frame.
> animate goto $f
> #Render
> render snapshot $f.bmp
> }
>
> This gives you a bunch of individual images, which you then need to
> combine together into a movie. I'm most familiar with a program called
> ffmpeg which will work and has windows binaries available, but a bit of
> googling should help you find the option that works best for you. Note
> that if the images look terrible, you may want to consider using a
> better renderer like Tachyon (snapshot is the cheapest, and best for
> just making prototypes quickly). See the documentation for a bit more
> info (http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/current/ug/node144.html).
>
> Good luck!
> -Josh Vermaas
>
> On 07/10/2013 01:22 PM, Hunter Brown wrote:
> > I am trying to make movies in VMD, however, VMD says I need MovieMach.exe. MovieMach is not free, contrary to what the 'Using vmd' tutorial states.
> >
> > See the tutorial text below:
> >
> > "Software requirements. If you cannot successfully make
> > movies with VMD, it???s possible that you???re missing some
> > softwares required for generating movies. All the required softwares are freely available, and to ???nd what software you need, please see the VMD Movie Plugin page at
> > http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/plugins/vmdmovie/."
> >
> >
> > -Hunter
> >
> > Hunter Brown
> > Bassoonist, Contrabassoonist, Composer, Chemical Engineering Major
> > University of New Mexico
> >

-- 
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