Re: [ccp4bb]: Movies for PowerPoints.

[Marc Saric <marc.saric@mpi-dortmund.mpg.de>]

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g.card@auckland.ac.nz wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> I thought someone had recently enquired about how to make movies of
> rotating structures for importing into PowerPoint. I've searched the ccp4
> archives but can't find the Q/A.
> 
> So, what programs do people use to do this?

I would suggest something which can be done with a script, so you donīt
have to convert images by hand.

The general outline:

1. Make Images of your molecule
2. Render them
3. Convert them to a movie-format (MPEG, Quicktime, DivX, AVI, ...). You
could also use a animated gif, but the quality isnīt that good.

Scriptable Programs for image generation might be:

Molscript
Molmol
ICM
WebLabViewer
InsightII(?)
Rasmol (no publication image quality)
.....

Renderers:

PovRay
Raster3D
Renderman
.....

Converters:

There are several commercial applications, which can produce movies from
single images.

ppmtompeg (?)
ImageMagick & MPEG
Quicktime-encoder (Apple ?)

I would write a script which does the rotation for you and writes out
and renders the imagefiles and concatenates them to a movie. So you only
need to prepare the Inputfile for your Renderer (say Molscript) and
afterwards change the rotation/translation-matrix stepwise to get the
desired effect.

Of course you can do without rendering, but it will look better.

-- 
Bye,  Marc Saric    

Max-Planck-Institut fuer molekulare Physiologie 
Otto-Hahn-Str.11  44227 Dortmund  phone:0231/133-2168