VMD Movie Plugin, Version 1.1
This plugin provides a complete solution for creating several
types of movies for presentations and science discussions.
The plugin automatically handles everything from
initial rendering of the movie frames, conversion of the
image file formats, image smoothing, image rescaling, text labelling,
and final compression and encoding of the images as an
Animated GIF, AVI, MPEG, or Quicktime movie.
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Software Requirements:
The movie script relies heavily on several key programs which provide
VMD with a means of generating the final movie files:
Microsoft Windows
- On Windows, the program VideoMach is currently required for all
movie generation tasks. It is a shareware program and is available
for trial download from the
VideoMach web site.
Registration costs $19 for non-commercial use, and $49 for commercial
use. The movie plugin currently expects that you have
VideoMach 2.7.2 installed in "c:\program files\VideoMach-2.7.2\vmach.exe"
MacOS X
- Install the Fink package manger on your MacOS X machine.
- Run 'fink install netpbm' to get the NetPBM toolkit required by the movie plugin.
- Run 'fink install imagemagick-nox' to get ImageMagick, required to create animated GIF movies
Unix platforms
- The NetPBM utilities are used to convert between image file formats
such as Targa, PPM, BMP, etc. NetPBM can be downloaded from the
NetPBM home page.
We are currently trying out "ppmtompeg" for use in MPEG-1 encoding
- The ImageMagick utilities are used (specifically, the convert program)
to provide the animated GIF output format. ImageMagick is available
from the ImageMagick web site.
- The SGI "dmconvert" tool is optionally used to provide conversions to
the MPEG, QuickTime, and SGI Movie formats. This option is only
available on the IRIX platforms.
Feature-specific notes:
Rendering using "Snapshot":
Some Windows and Linux OpenGL video drivers behave erratically with
the "snapshot" rendering mode, so it may be necessary to use one of
the ray tracers if you have a video driver that gives "garbled" images
when you use the "snapshot" rendering mode.
Rendering using "Tachyon":
Since Tachyon is packaged with VMD itself, this is the best choice
for ray tracing if you don't already have POV-Ray or other packages
installed.
Software antialiasing post-processing:
The use of antialiasing can greatly improve the quality of the final
movie as it will reduce artifacts tha generally decrease the effectiveness
of the back-end compression algorithms in MPEG, AVI and other movie formats.
To use software-based post processing on machines or renderers that lack
built-in antialising, check the "smoothing" button, then enable the
half-size rescale button and make your VMD window twice the size
(on both axes) that you want the final movie to be. Once this
is done, you may render the movie.
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