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° | Create your own YASARA Movies |
YASARA Movies (available from www.yasara.org/movies
) are multimedia presentations containing molecular animations you could not create with standard office software.
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Because movies usually feature very complex animations,
they cannot be clicked together with the mouse, but are written in any text editor using the
Yanaconda macro language. This allows you to quickly copy and paste blocks from different movies to create a scaffold for your own productions.
Go to the yasara/mov directory and create a subdirectory with the name of your movie. In this subdirectory,
you must then store all the data needed by your movie, including the Yanaconda macro
(named like your movie, but with a .mcr extension). As a start,
open the macro yasara/mov/mdintro/mdintro.mcr, an introduction to molecular dynamics simulations. If you do not have this movie,
download it from www.yasara.org/movies
. Change the header to match your movie. The chapter numbers in the TOPIC and TITLE fields define where your movie appears when you click on Help
> Play help movie. Example:
# YASARA MOVIE # TOPIC: 6. NMR Spectroscopy # TITLE: 6.4. KING - Killing Inaccurate NOEs by Guessing # REQUIRES: Dynamics # AUTHOR: MyName # LICENSE: GPL
Use the following commands at the beginning:
The probably most crucial command in a movie is
Wait, which waits for a given condition and updates the screen while waiting
. Normally, YASARA redraws the screen after each command. This is convenient when working interactively,
but it is not what you want in a movie, because often more than one command is needed to do something. If the intermediate steps were all shown on screen,
this would be very annoying. Consequently YASARA stops updating the screen as soon as the
console is switched off. It is then your duty to tell YASARA that the macro has reached a point where it can be held to update the screen. This is achieved with the
Wait command:
While the macro is waiting,
all automatic movements or rotations continue normally: Console off LoadPDB 1crn # Start an automatic rotation in steps of 2 degrees about the Y-axis AutoRotateObj 1crn,Y=2 # Wait for 180 screen updates (=360/2, one full rotation of 1crn) Wait 180 # And stop after one full rotation AutoRotateObj 1crn,Y=0 Alternatively, this macro would do the same:
Console off LoadPDB 1crn # Run 180 single rotation steps in a loop for i=1 to 180 RotateObj 1crn,Y=2 Wait 1 Nevertheless, the first macro is the preferred one, because it allows YASARA to
speedup the rotation on slow computers: if the graphics card is not capable of displaying
180 rotation steps fast enough, YASARA may decide to show only 90 and rotate 1crn in steps of four instead of two degrees.
Waiting for a pressed button is helpful for tutorials and talks. However,
you maybe want two different versions of your movie: one which you can use during your talk,
and one which actually displays the things you want to say on screen, so that people who missed your talk can download the movie instead. The second one would then also use a
'ContinueButton', so that the audience can e.g. rotate a protein structure before continuing.
This can be achieved with the 'Help' flag. If a movie is run via Help
> Play help movie, the variable 'Help' is set to 1. You can therefore start a movie with the following code:
if Help # If we are showing a help movie, wait for clicks on the ContinueButton button='ContinueButton' else # Otherwise just wait for a click on the left mouse button button='LeftButton' And then use
Wait (button)to wait for the button you selected above. If you want,
add your text:
if Help ShowMessage "Welcome everyone to my first YASARA movie. Today, I will tell you about.."
Every new section in your movie should start with a label,
followed by the Clear command. # # SLIDE 1: Title Page # TitlePage: Clear LoadPDB 1crn The label makes sure that you can jump to this point using any of these methods:
The Clear command sets YASARA to a defined state,
which is important because the user can jump to a label at any time while a macro is executed. In case you do not want to clear everything
(e.g. some logos you loaded as image 1 and which you want to display during the entire presentation),
use your own Clear command: TitlePage: # MyClear: Delete all objects and all but the first image DelObj All DelImage !1 If you want to temporarily skip a section during development,
just comment it out using triple quotes """ in the beginning and the end.
To quickly develop a movie, follow these steps:
When preparing movies for a scientific presentation that may last several hours,
writing everything from scratch in Yanaconda takes too long. An efficient solution is to prepare the slides in OpenOffice Impress or Microsoft Powerpoint,
to convert them to a YASARA movie and to finally add animations on those slides that require them.
The procedure is as follows:
YASARA can load bitmap images in PNG or (worse, because uncompressed) BMP format. These bitmaps can be displayed as
(transparent) back- and foreground graphics or attached as textures to objects.
In practice, you use the LoadPNG
and LoadBMP commands to load the image, then
show, move
or animate it. Objects with attached images
need to be created separately.
Example to show five images in a row: for i=1 to 5 LoadPNG MyImage(i) ShowImage MyImage(i) Wait (Button) DelImage MyImage(i)
If you have only a small amount of text, you can display and animate it directly by creating a
text object and printing
to it using your favorite font: MakeTextObj Title,Width=800,Height=80 Font Name=Baikal,Height=40%,Color=White,Spacing=2,Depth=100,DepthCol=ff8000 PosText 50%,50%,Justify=Center Print "Molecular Dynamics Simulations\n" Print "Watching Nature@Work" PosObj Title,0,180,670
YASARA automatically scales the scene such that movies always look the same,
independent of the actual window size, as long as the aspect ratio of the view area does not change. E.g. if you create your movie with a view area of
1024x768 pixels, it will look exactly the same when played back in a view area of
640x480 pixels. The 'view area' is the part of the YASARA window where you can see molecules. If you disable
menus, then the view area is identical to the
YASARA window size, otherwise it is lower by
48 pixels (the top and bottom menu bar are each 24 pixels high). Example: You want to create a movie that will be played back on a cheap video beamer with
640x480 pixels resolution, but you do not want to make your window that small while creating the movie. In addition you still want to use the menus,
but you do of course not want to show the menus with the beamer. So the final movie resolution will be 640x480 pixels, that's an aspect ratio of
640/480 = 1.333. Now you need a window size that gives you the same aspect ratio for the view area. A typical choice for the view area is
1024x768 pixels (1024/768 = 1.333). As we also want to show the menu bars which require
48 pixels, the final window size is 1024x(768+48) = 1024x816. Press <Space> to bring up the console and type:
ScreenSize 1024,816 Now create your movie, and to play it back on the beamer,
add the following commands:
ScreenSize 640,480 Menu off Two little exceptions from these rules:
When you base your talk at a scientific conference or job interview on a YASARA movie,
consider the following hints to make everything run smoothly:
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