> On a second note (and sorry to open up this debate again), What is the > consensus for displaying a pymol movie in a presentation package such as > powerpoint? i've tried avi and mpeg but i find that there is a loss in > the quailty when compared to the sharpness of a animated gif.
I'm pretty sure animated gifs are limited to 256 colors, unless the technology has improved since I last used it. I've definitely noticed that they're slower and result in larger files. MPEG encoding can be tweaked in many ways and can give very high-quality movies with the right settings. (Remember, DVDs use MPEG encoding too, with high enough quality that it doesn't look like lossy compression.) If you're unfortunate enough to have a PC around, I've found the program VideoMach to be superb for compiling MPEGs of PyMOL movies. It's freely downloadable, and $25 after the trial period expires. You can select the exact bitrate and framerate. (The latter is especially important for recent versions of PowerPoint, which have a pretty awful bug in movie playback.) If anyone has found a reasonable solution for MPEG encoding on Linux, I'd love to hear of it. The program I used to use appears to be no longer actively developed, and it was buggy to begin with. -Nat
