[Chimera-users] MD movie metafile

[Elaine Meng]

HI Matthias,
Sounds like you almost had it right.  However, you have to use the “open” command to open the metafile.  The “md” part is just a format specifier for the open command, not a command in itself.

(command list: <http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/framecommand.html>)

Summary:
To bypass the MD Movie input-files dialog you would create a “metafile” which is just a short plain text file of the same things you would enter into that dialog.  The "startup and input" section of the MD Movie help has a couple examples of metafile contents:
<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/ContributedSoftware/movie/framemovie.html>

Your metafile would just contain something like this:
namd(prmtop/dcd)
D:\structure.psf
D:\structure_MD001.dcd

…and you’d open it with command:
open md:metafile-name

…where metafile-name is a pathname if it is not in the current working directory.  However, I suspect that pathname with a colon might cause problejms. Chimera command “cd” changes the current working directory, so if giving the pathname directly in the open command causes a problem, instead use “cd” to go that folder and then just use the metafile name in the open command.   I’m a little uncertain of what you’ll need to do, since I’m not a Windows user.  On Mac, all my pathnames don’t have colons in them so it’s not an issue.

I hope this helps,
Elaine
-----
Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D.                       
UCSF Chimera(X) team
Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
University of California, San Francisco


> On Oct 11, 2018, at 7:58 PM, Matthias Fellner <matthias.fellner at otago.ac.nz> wrote:
> 
> Good day
> 
> I successfully loaded NAMD psf/dcd files into chimera (version 1.13.1) using the tools MD movie interface. As I have many runs and each has multiple dcd files I wanted to use a script to load the different runs, instead of manually picking all the files through the interface each time. I tried to follow the limited instructions of the MD Movie homepage but failed to get anywhere.
> I tried some versions of this command:
> md: D:\script.txt or movie: D:\script.txt
> 
> The command md appears to try to start MDA (MultiDomain Assembler), the command movie wants some other unrelated inputs.
> I am also not sure if the script command would even work like this:
> 
> namd(psf/dcd)
> D:\structure.psf
> structure_MD001.dcd - D:\
> 
> Any advice is appreciated
> Thank you
> Matthias Fellner
>