Hi Jared, If you use Chimera commands that specify how many frames to rotate, shift, scale, fade over, ... then it does not matter how fast or slow your machine is. Each frame is recorded only after it is drawn, and none will be skipped. Only when you move a model by hand with the mouse will it matter how fast the machine is. Here are some problems with smooth transitions I have observed. Fading out a PDB model in stick mode produced all kinds of weird flickering of the bonds. This I believe is a bug in Chimera transparency of bonds and I plan on submitting a bug report for that. Smoothly changing the contour level does not produce a very smooth change in surface appearance. Little spots pop up or disappear at discrete contour levels. This is because the contouring algorithm (marching cubes) changes the surface triangulation in discrete ways when the contour level passes through a grid point data value. I don't know of any remedy although using surface smoothing (volume dialog under surface and mesh options) may help. Let me know what problems you encounter. I am interested in improving the Chimera movie capabilities. Tom

Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 13:11:39 -0500 From: "Jared Godar" <jared.godar@vanderbilt.edu> Sender: jared.godar@gmail.com To: "Thomas Goddard" <goddard@cgl.ucsf.edu> Subject: Re: [Chimera-users] Movie Question: EM Densities about robbon structures

I did, thank you much... I have successfully installed the additional extensions and am attempting to incorporate them into a .CMD script for my movie. So far that is going fairly smoothly, with the exception of frames involving fading in/out of structures are taking significantly longer than others resulting in a jumpy movie. I'm going to attempt to try it on a fastest machine and see if that helps.

The independent rotation is working, the fade in/out of specific models is good, and I'm going to try the contour transition next.

Thanks again,

Jared