[chimerax-users] Problems with making movie in chimerax

[Elaine Meng]

Hi Nandish,
This boils down to a morph question.  Omitting the complication of the movie, just look at the trajectory and the two input structures.  Unless you moved the morph trajectory model separately after it was created, the position at the first frame of the morph trajectory should be exactly the same as the position in the starting structure input to the morph calculation, and the position at the last frame of the morph trajectory should be exactly the same as the position in the ending structure input to the morph calculation.

I think the problem is that the morph trajectory will include 101 frames.  This is explained in the help page, that when you specify "frames N" the total number of frames in the trajectory = 1 + N(number of stages).  Your morph trajectory has one stage, one conformational change.
<http://rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimerax/docs/user/commands/morph.html>

I didn't review the help page but just tried an example with your same commands, and when the morph calculated there is a message shown in the log that it has 101 frames, and the playback slider title bar also says it has 101 frames.

So your wait 100 command only ensures the first 100 frames are in the movie, not all 101.

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

> On May 6, 2020, at 3:33 PM, Nandish Kumar Khanra <nkk2001 at med.cornell.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hello all,
> 
> I want to make a movie of a multi-domain protein between two functional states using Chimerax. One domain undergoes drastic conformational change while there is virtually no structural change in another domain. I did the following steps to make the movie. 
> 
> 	• Aligned two models using matchmaker,
> mm #1 to #2 pair ss ss false
> 
> 	• make morph
> morph #1,2 frames 100 play false cartesian true
> 
> 	• make movie
> movie record size 1000,1000
> coordset #3
> wait 100
> movie encode output ~/Desktop/movie1.mp4 quality higher framerate 25 roundTrip true
> 
> The stationary domain of two functional states aligned perfectly after structural alignment, but I do see motions in that domain in the movie. Am I doing anything wrong? Is there a way to overcome this?
> 
> Thanks,
> Nandish