MovieSchool 1

Movie Making

While PyMOL's capability to produce static images is quite powerful, there are some stories that are better told through movies, than static images alone. This little page will provide the necessary ideas, links, code and examples for making movies in PyMOL.

Your First Movie

Movies can be very simple, for example, animating an NMR ensemble:

# Your first movie.
fetch 1nmr
mplay

# to stop the movie when you're ready
# type 'mstop'.

What PyMOL did here was to fetch the file from the PDB and load it into an object with 20 states. Somewhere between then and issuing mplay PyMOL created 20 frames for your object and assigned one state to each frame. This created the animated effect as we scroll through the frames.