A long asked for feature for DS is to create simple movies or animations. In DS 2.5.5 we added a method from scripting that allows you to save out an image when running interactively from Discovery Studio. Using that method it is now easy to generate a set of numbered images that you can use in many image/movie packages to produce simple movies. In this post, I'll demonstrate some scripts and provide instructions for GIMP 2.6 (www.gimp.org), a free image tool for both Windows and Linux that creates animated GIF files.

First the scripts. The new SaveImage function for several document types allows you to save out several image formats, I use PNG. By default the image is saved using the size of the current window, but you can specify a different size as optional arguments. By rotating the image or animating a trajectory in between calls to SaveImage, you can produce a set of numbered images. Attached are three scripts to do this. The first two rotate such as to spin the molecule 360 degrees, or rock it side to side by 15 degrees. The third script loops over all conformations in a trajectory and saves each as an image. Each script saves a numbered series of PNG files into the folder containing the script.

Generating an animation from these numbered images is easy to do in several software packages. For GIMP 2.6 you simply:

1) Go to File|Open as Layers. Browse to the location of the images and select (using the shift key) all the numbered images. Click open to import them all.

2) Go to File|Save As and choose a filename with ".gif" as the extension. Click "Save".

3) In the "Export File" dialog that pops up, choose "Save as Animation" and click "Export".

4) Click "Save" in the "Save as GIF" dialog that pops up. You can also specify some other options here if you wish, like whether to play in a loop.

This will create an animated GIF file. GIF is a reasonable format for short movies like these. Although it does not support full color, most animations from DS look good. I've attached the three GIF files produced using the scripts above.

Click image or "Save Link As" to view animations.

In the future we may add the ability to save such gif files directly from DS. If there are other movie/encapsulation formats you would like to see supported, or if you have any other requests in this area, please post a reply.

Message was edited by: amaynard Fixed images which didn't transfer from old forums.