[Chimera-users] POV-Ray setting for movie making

[Eric Pettersen]

On Apr 22, 2010, at 11:13 AM, Thomas Goddard wrote:

> Hi Paul,
>
>  Eric Pettersen, another Chimera developer, I believe tested some  
> different POV-ray settings, and Greg Couch has worked on that code a  
> lot.  I don't really know anything about the POV-ray settings  
> because I think I get better results without POV-ray as discussed by  
> Elaine in a previous mailing list message.
>
> http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/pipermail/chimera-users/2009-June/004030.html
>
>  I'm sending your POV-ray settings question to the mailing list and  
> perhaps Eric or Greg will have suggestions.
>
>
>> Thanks Tom,
>>
>> The mpeg4 movie with qscale 1 looks pretty good. I forgot to  
>> mention in
>> my first message that I was setting bitrate to 10000, and yet still  
>> the
>> results were fuzzy around the edges. Seems like variable bitrate is  
>> the
>> way to go.
>>
>> Can you give me any advice on antialias method, depth, threshold
>> (currently I’m using recursive, 3, 0.3, respectively) or jitter (I’m
>> using true with an amount of 1.0). I’ve read the chimera manual  
>> entries
>> on the topics but I’m still confused, can’t see much difference  
>> when I
>> change variables one at a time. Do you have favorite settings for  
>> these
>> variables? Time to process, as long as it stays within a week for a  
>> 1600
>> frame movie is fine, the product will go out as supplemental material
>> for a paper, so I’m willing to wait if some change to the settings  
>> I’m
>> using now will make a difference.

Hi Paul,
	It's been awhile since I fiddled with the POV settings, but I guess I  
do have two recommendations:

1) Move the antialias threshold back to at least 0.5 -- and I'd  
suggest using the default 1.0.  In my tests I found no visual  
difference whatsoever between 0.3 and 0.5 and minimal difference  
between 0.5 and 1.0, whereas it makes a considerable time difference.

2) Turn off jitter.  As it says in the documentation it looks bad in  
movies (particularly if you are using text labels).

--Eric

                         Eric Pettersen
                         UCSF Computer Graphics Lab
                         http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu


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