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

[Ralph Loring]

Hi Elaine,
Great! That works! I can't easily get to my desktop on my office computer
unless I go to OneDrive, but it works if I point to the Videos folder
instead.  I was trying to do that, but didn't know about the semicolons.
Thanks so much!! Now if I can just generalize this as directions for the
students without knowing much about their directory structures...
Ralph Loring

On Thu, Feb 3, 2022 at 2:18 PM Elaine Meng <meng at cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:

> 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
>
>
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