Hi Camila, The command to rotate your models smoothly is called "turn". Here's an example sequence of commands that rotates about the screen vertical axis in 3 degree steps for 120 steps (total of 360 degrees), waits for that rotation to finish, then writes the movie file m2.mov to your desktop. movie record ; turn y 3 120 ; wait 120 ; movie encode output ~/Desktop/m2.mov These 4 commands separated by semicolons can be typed as one command to the Chimera command-line (menu Favorites / Command-line). More commonly I'd put the 4 commands in a file, say movie.cmd, with one command on each line (no semi-colons) and just open that file in Chimera (File / Open...) to record the movie. Putting the commands in a file gives you more flexibility when you want to add more fancy motions or color changes by adding additional commands. Take a look at the Chimera movie making tutorial for ideas of additional useful commands http://plato.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/data/tutorials/movies09/moviemaking.html Tom Camilla wrote:

Hi, My name is Camilla and I'm an undergrad student at UNC-CH. I've been using Chimera to create models of fibrinogen polymerization. I discovered that I could make movies of my models to be able to see them from all views. However, my videos are very choppy and since I rotate the model by mouse, the movies are very poorly made. Is there a specific command I could use where I can get the model to rotate 360 degrees by itself to make this movie more smooth and to be able to still see the model all the way around one axis?

Thank you, Camilla

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Hi Camilla, Yes, there are commands to perform movements smoothly over some number of frames. For rotation about an axis see "roll": <http://plato.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/midas/roll.html> ... other movie-related commands: <http://plato.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/movies.html#moviecommands> However, probably the easiest thing to look at first are example movie-making command scripts and movie-making tutorial, links here: <http://plato.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/movies.html#examples> <http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/data/tutorials/movies09/moviemaking.html> As you will see, the recording itself can be controlled with the "movie" command -- if you do it that way, you don't have to worry about the timing of pressing buttons on the Movie Recorder dialog. General info on making movies in Chimera: <http://plato.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/movies.html> I hope this helps, Elaine ----- Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D. UCSF Computer Graphics Lab (Chimera team) and Babbitt Lab Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry University of California, San Francisco On Sep 9, 2011, at 2:40 PM, Camilla wrote:

Hi, My name is Camilla and I'm an undergrad student at UNC-CH. I've been using Chimera to create models of fibrinogen polymerization. I discovered that I could make movies of my models to be able to see them from all views. However, my videos are very choppy and since I rotate the model by mouse, the movies are very poorly made. Is there a specific command I could use where I can get the model to rotate 360 degrees by itself to make this movie more smooth and to be able to still see the model all the way around one axis? Thank you, Camilla