[chimerax-users] Transparent background movie

[Elaine Meng]

Hi,
Sorry, as you have seen, “movie” doesn’t have the transparentBackground option that is available with the “save” command.
<http://rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimerax/docs/user/commands/save.html#image>
<http://rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimerax/docs/user/commands/movie.html>

Chimera had a “bgopacity” startup option, but as far as I know this has not been implemented in ChimeraX.

I can imagine possibly using the “save” command (with transparentBackground true) as a “perframe” action to manually script saving all of the individual image frames, and then using a separate program to encode the image frames into a movie, but it would be a lot of work.  Alternatively, there may be programs able to post-process your solid-background movie into a transparent-background movie, but I haven’t investigated or tried to do that myself.

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

> On Jun 14, 2019, at 6:34 AM, Norberto Escudero <ne272 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> I have succesfully created images with transparent background, but it seems is an impossible task for a movie. Is there any way around this?
> Thanks and regards,
> -- 
> Dr Norberto Escudero Urquijo
> Prof. A. Warren's group
> Cambridge Institute for Medical Research (CIMR)
> Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 0XY