Hi Ernesto,

I see that Chimera daily builds are incorrectly giving the option "-qscale 8" to ffmpeg, the program included in Chimera that does the movie encoding. The "-qscale 8" conflicts and apparently overrides the "-b 5000kb" bit rate setting you requested. Both Chimera 1.5.3 and daily builds use qscale 8 which is variable bit rate encoding if you do not specify bitrate. Recent changes to Chimera movie defaults broke the movie quality handling. I have fixed it. The fix will be in tonight's daily build, dated Jan 5 on the download page

http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/download.html#daily

Thanks for identifying the problem.

Tom

Hi everyone,

I've made some movies using the current Chimera alpha version (alpha version 1.6 build 35109, 2011-12-24) in an ubuntu 10.04 laptop. I've noticed that the quality of the movies is worse that in the version 1.5.3, and I have generated the movies using the same chimera session and the same script. I've seen this for at least avi and mp4 formats.

The movie options I'm using in the script are:
movie record supersample 3
movie encode output movie.avi bitrate 5000 framerate 25 mformat avi

Does anybody know why the quality is worse in the newer Chimera version?
Thanks in advance,
Ernesto.