Subject: Re:molecular animation tools

From: "Fabian Boes" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 10:43:29 +0100

hello ...

>Can anyone recommend other inexpensive animation software for making
>"movies" in a common format from a series of still frames?

i am using the following windows based software for doing my animations:

"Pymol" -> for creating the animation and saving single .png files for each frame
"IrfanView" -> for converting the .png into .bmp files
"pjBmp2Avi" -> for creating an uncompressed .avi file out of the bitmap (or .tga ) files. frame rate can be specified as well as the keyframes.

the resulting animation in uncompressed .avi format is very large (approx. 900 MB for 40 sec. with 640x480 resolution, 25fps). thus i compress it using the programm "Virtualdub" with the open-source video codec "Xvid", which is similar to the popular "DivX" codec. 

"Virtualdub" is not able to save .mpeg files, but you can use "TMPGEnc" to create .mpeg files out of your uncompressed .avi file. 

all of the programs i mentioned are - as far as i now - open-source, freeware or shareware, excluding "TMPGEnc" which is free only for personal use (see their website for more details).

here are the links:

"Pymol" -> http://www.pymol.org
"IrfanView" -> http://www.irfanview.com
"pjBmp2Avi" -> http://www.cspltd.ndirect.co.uk/graphics/anim.htm
"Virtualdub" -> http://www.virtualdub.org/
"XVid" -> http://www.xvid.org (just the source-code, a comiled version can be found here: http://www.roeder.goe.net/%7Ekoepi/xvid.shtml)
"TMPGEnc" -> http://www.tmpgenc.net/

hope i could help you a little bit, if there are any questions left, feel free to ask.

fabian
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Fabian Bös

Institute of Technical Biochemistry
University of Stuttgart / Germany

Phone:   +49-711-6857481
Fax:       +49-711-6853196
Email:     [email-masked]

http://www.itb.uni-stuttgart.de
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