[chimerax-users] Is there an output directory command for spin movies or morphs?

[Elaine Meng]

Hi Ralph,
I don't know of a solution to change the behavior of the icon (maybe one of the programmers can suggest something), but I see in the documentation
<https://rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimerax/docs/user/tools/toolbar.html#home>

... that it runs a command like:

movie record; turn y 2 180; wait; 
movie encode ~/Desktop/movieN.mp4

(all on one line with multiple command separated by semicolons, where N is automatically incremented so that you can save multiple files instead overwriting).  

Thus one possibility is instead of clicking the icon, to issue that same set of 3 commands, again all in one line separated by semicolons, except change the output movie pathname "~/Desktop/movieN.mp4" to a different pathname.  It should be a folder location that exists, and filename ending in ".mp4" ... also the whole pathname would need to be enclosed in quotation marks if it contains spaces.  Maybe that is too difficult, but the only solution as a nonprogrammer that I can think of at this time.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

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

> On Feb 3, 2022, at 5:47 AM, Ralph Loring via ChimeraX-users <chimerax-users at cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> I've given my students an assignment due on Monday which includes making a spin movie.  About a third of the class tells me that they can see the molecule spinning while the movie is compiling, but that they can't find where the mp4 file goes.  I have no trouble using my laptop, but if I use my office desktop computer, I have the same problem (see picture).  The first two error messages were endogenously generated by ChimeraX, the last 3 were me trying to force the output directory.  When I spoke to our IT people, they informed me that university computers are not allowed to save files to the public desktop, but prefer that it go to the user desktop in Onedrive.  My question is whether there's a command that I can give before running a spin movie that specifies in what directory the output file should be put?
> Thanks,
> Ralph