Hi Natesh, The usual cause of empty movies is that you did not use the "wait" command in your movie recording. That is the command that waits for frames to be rendered. Here is an example set of command to make a movie rotating a structure 90 degrees. open 1a0m movie record ; turn y 1 90 ; wait 90 ; movie encode ~/Desktop/test.mp4 Here is a Chimera movie making tutorial that gives more examples https://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/data/nih-oct2012/movies.html and here is detailed Chimera movie documentation https://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/movies.html Tom

On Jan 28, 2026, at 5:04 PM, Natesh Singh via Chimera-users <chimera-users@cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:

Dear support team, I am trying to make a md movie using the md movie utility of Chimera 1.19. But it seems that in the end, it is creating a kb size mp4 file with no movie inside. Can anyone help me in this regard? sincerely Natesh _______________________________________________ Chimera-users mailing list -- chimera-users@cgl.ucsf.edu To unsubscribe send an email to chimera-users-leave@cgl.ucsf.edu Archives: https://mail.cgl.ucsf.edu/mailman/archives/list/chimera-users@cgl.ucsf.edu/

Hi Natesh, The better way to report a problem: Instead of sending email here, could you try it again and then when you get the empty movie, before quitting from Chimera, please use menu: Help... Report a Bug. Include a brief description of the problem and your email address in the report. The bug reporter will automatically include information about your version number, type of computer system, what is in the log, etc. so we might be able to figure out what happened. Using Chimera 1.19 on my own computer, I cannot reproduce this problem; the movie turns out fine. <https://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/ContributedSoftware/movie/movie.html#...> Thanks in advance for submitting a report, Elaine ----- Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D. UCSF Chimera(X) team Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry University of California, San Francisco

On Jan 28, 2026, at 10:54 PM, Natesh Singh via Chimera-users <chimera-users@cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:

Hello Tom, Thanks for your reply. But I am trying to make a movie from a single PDB MD trajectory file using the MD Movie plugin in Chimera. <image.png>In the past, I had successfully used this plugin to create movies from MD simulation trajectories, but suddenly it is not working. It is creating empty movies, so I am not able to understand what happened in the meantime. Could you reflect on this about the possible reasons, some software update needed, etc? It seems that at the end of playing frames ffmpeg.exe opens up, but it is not able to transform the frames into a video file. I see the empty screen of ffmpeg.exe, followed by an empty video file. Many thanks Natesh

On Thu, Jan 29, 2026 at 2:25 AM Tom Goddard <goddard@sonic.net> wrote: Hi Natesh,

The usual cause of empty movies is that you did not use the "wait" command in your movie recording. That is the command that waits for frames to be rendered. Here is an example set of command to make a movie rotating a structure 90 degrees.

open 1a0m movie record ; turn y 1 90 ; wait 90 ; movie encode ~/Desktop/test.mp4

Here is a Chimera movie making tutorial that gives more examples

https://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/data/nih-oct2012/movies.html

and here is detailed Chimera movie documentation

https://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/movies.html

Tom

...

On Jan 28, 2026, at 5:04 PM, Natesh Singh via Chimera-users <chimera-users@cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:

Dear support team, I am trying to make a md movie using the md movie utility of Chimera 1.19. But it seems that in the end, it is creating a kb size mp4 file with no movie inside. Can anyone help me in this regard? sincerely Natesh