VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Sun Feb 09 2003 - 23:05:20 CST

Hi Sanjeev,
  The movie maker works by using the snapshot feature just like
for still frames. The actual quality you get in the final movie
depends on many factors. Generally speaking, if you're making
an MPEG for a PowerPoint presentation, you want to keep the
resolution of the VMD window small, something like a window size
of 320x240 is likely to produce decent results. If you're using
one of the other movie formats, let me know which one and I can
provide other suggestions. VMD itself doesn't do anything differently
than it would if you used snapshot, but the back-end video compression
that's done is very sensitive to the material that you start with,
so it is important to feed it source material that will produce
good results in the final animation format.

By "delay time" I assume that you're referring to the playback frame rate
of the final movie file? The current version of the vmdmovie script
assumes an older version of the NetPBM tools, which only supported a
single frame rate for the MPEG encoder. If you have something
specific in mind, let me know, I can provide help with this.

Thanks,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Mon, Feb 10, 2003 at 10:36:00AM +0530, Sanjeev B.S. wrote:
> Hello,
> I need a small help. I am trying to make a movie for PPT
> presentation. So I need it as a MPEG/AVI file. I tried VMD vmdmovie
> script, but there were a couple of problems. First, the quality of images
> was not good, probably due to lower quality used for saving (while with
> snapshot produced beautiful pictures). Second was that I could not change
> the delay time. I use Linux OS, and I would be grateful for any help this
> regard.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> -Sanjeev
> PS: I am sorry if this is a routine question..., but I do not remember
> seening this in the recent past that I could recollect. 

-- 
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