VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed Jan 16 2002 - 11:38:14 CST

Dear VMD-L,
  I have been developing a movie making script for VMD that
is a complete solution for creating Animated GIF, AVI, Quicktime,
and MPEG movies with VMD. The movie script uses several helper
programs to do its work, but provides a completely automatic way
to generate movies without having to do a lot of manual script
processing and running of batch jobs etc. The script is available
as part of the VMD script library here:
  http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/script_library/scripts/vmdmovie/

Since the script is a test release, I am still in the process of
adding new movie encoder support, improving the GUI, and finding/fixing
bugs. If you would like to try it out, please go ahead and give us
feedback if you have questions or run into problems. In order to
use the script you'll need these programs installed
(and in your path, on Unix systems):
  Windows:
    The "VideoMach" package, see the movie script page for links and
    information.

  Unix:
    NetPBM (frame conversion)
    ImageMagick (animated GIF format, frame conversion)
    SGI dmconvert (AVI, MPEG, Quicktime)
    'ffmpeg' (MPEG-1 generator, works on Linux)

The script now runs on Windows and Unix systems, with the two
best-supported platforms being Windows and SGI IRIX at the
present time using "VideoMach" (Windows) and "dmconvert" (SGI).
These platforms provide AVI and MPEG encoding presently, and are
pretty reliable.

For other Unix platforms, the "animated GIF" option is currently the
most reliable output medium. I'm working on getting several MPEG encoders
working on Linux and Solaris, but at the present moment only the
'ffmpeg' option is ready, and even so the 'ffmpeg' utility is somewhat
buggy.

If you have questions, pleast let me know. I have several more updates
to complete on this script today and tomorrow, adding support for more
MPEG encoders, after that I'll be working on improving the user interface
again.

I'll be updating the movie script page over the next few days as
improvements are made to the script, etc.

Thanks, and enjoy!

  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349              
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078
----- End forwarded message -----
-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349              
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078