[chimerax-users] Limits on movies

[Elaine Meng]

Hi Maria,
I believe that "limit" with maxframes is the only built-in limit on the movie length.  My only idea of what else to do is to make sure that you have all the proper "wait" commands in place so that the encoding doesn't start before all the other actions in the script before have finished. 

<http://rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimerax/docs/user/commands/movie.html>

It is possible that larger volumes and models cause the various commands prior to encoding to execute more slowly, so it could be consistent with my theory of needing more "wait" frames, as well as your theory that it is a memory issue of some kind.

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

> On Aug 9, 2020, at 7:38 PM, mailman-bounces at cgl.ucsf.edu wrote:
> 
> From: Maria Maldonado <mmaldo at ucdavis.edu>
> Subject: Limits on movies
> Date: August 9, 2020 at 7:23:21 PM PDT
> 
> Hi!
>  
> I have a question about movies and thought you might be able to help. Is there a limit to the length of the movies other than the limit  maxframes? I’ve made scripts for movies with several steps. All the motions/commands show in the ChimeraX window while it is rendering, the script gets to the end and says “movie encoded”. However, when I open the movie file, the movie is missing several frames/steps. This happens even though I increased the limit maxframes (and my movies should be shorter than 15000 to begin with). If I split the original movie into shorter chunks that works fine, but I’ll have to edit the steps together in a different programme. I was wondering if this has to do with ChimeraX, or whether maybe it could be a computer memory issue or something else outside of the programme? It seems to be worse (ie the movie file stops earlier) for larger volumes and models than for smaller ones.
>  
> Thank you very much for your help!
>  
> Best,
> Maria