From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed Jun 15 2022 - 00:19:43 CDT

Hi,
  Sorry for the delayed reply, I've been away from email while using
up vacation days that were on the chopping block...

The "vmdmovie" plugin itself can be driven from an external
loop, so it can be easly called from a parallel rendering script.
We did this extensively for the work described here:
  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.parco.2020.102698
  http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.parco.2015.10.015

Rather than driving "vmdmovie" directly however, most of the cases
where this was done were instead driving the "viewchangerender" plugin,
which already has tie-ins to the "vmdmovie" plugin to drive it.

If you're still interested in doing this, I've attached old
scripts that did this for some fairly simple VR movies we rendered
a while back, in a couple of different variations. I have lots of
other variants floating around, but this one was easy to locate.

Best,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Sun, May 29, 2022 at 03:33:46PM -0700, Chris Taylor wrote:
> Is there an example of using the vmdmovie plugin and 'parallel' in a TCL script to parallelize rendering frames of a movie across a cluster? I have MPI compiled into VMD and a simple parallel script works fine- it would be nice to use some of the features the plugin provides like 'ppmtompeg' and baked-in animations.

-- 
NIH Center for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/           Phone: 217-244-3349
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/