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Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group
VMD Movie Plugin
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
UIUC

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.

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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