MPEG and Other Movie Formats

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There area a number of different 'motion picture' formats on the various types of computer platforms. The Motion Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) was formed to define a standard. In this format, the file contains details of which elements of the picture change from frame to frame. Variation of picture quality allows some control over the size of the file.

MPEG players exist for various types of computer. Here is a sample.

VMPEG for MS Windows
Sparkle for Macs (also plays QuickTime)
Berkely's mpeg_play

Other motion-picture formats include QuickTime (QT) and Silicon Graphics Movie Format (which has a degree of compatibility with QT) and Cinemation (Macs).

Example MPEG movies

Movies are useful for displaying conformational changes in proteins, protein-ligand docking, and for displaying trajectories of Molecular Dynamics and Monte Carlo simulations.

(Make sure you have your MPEG player configured as a helper application for your WWW browser. For Unix systems, the line in your .mailcap file is something like:

video/mpeg; xterm -T  MPEG  -e mpeg_play -dither 2x2 -loop %s
|________|  |_____________|____________|___________|_______|
     |              |            |           |         |
  MIME type  starts an xterm   executes    doubles   plays MPEG in a loop
             window titled     software     frame
             'MPEG'          ('mpeg_play'   dimensions
                             in this case)

The above assumes you are using the 'mpeg_play' program. This software uses the 'dither' and 'loop' parameters (and several others)- ignore them if you want.)

Adenylate Kinases- the movie Clemens Vonrhein & Gerd Schlauderer, Chemistry, University of Freiburg
The lactoferrin movie on PPS Consultant Mark Gerstein's Home Page, Stanford University
Molecular Animations at the tech univ of Darmstadt, including docking of Bovine Pancreatic Trypsin Inhibitor with trypsin/trypsinogen
Acetylcholinesterase movie at the Cornell Theory Center - Richard Gilliland, and Daniel Ripoll, Carlos Faerman
Cellobiohydrolase animationsLeif Laaksonen, Lauri Kuutti, Center for Scientific Computing, Otaniemi, Finland
Barnase unfolding at 80°C using novel water-insertion protocol (Mark Williams, Michael Knaggs and Julia Goodfellow, in preparation); movies by Michael Knaggs protein only (2.3 Mb); showing newly inserted water molecules (5.5 Mb)
Leos Kral's animation of mRNA Translation, also in other movie formats (MPEG conversion by PPS Consultant Michael Knaggs

Examples in other formats

Molecular Animations of Large Molecules in AVI format by Andrew Booth, at the University of Leeds
Leos Kral's animation of mRNA Translation
- Get the Quicktime format (also plays on SGI movieplayer) from here
- Get the Cinemation format from here
- Birkbeck Crystallography's mirror
Actin-myosin conformational changes during contraction of muscle fibres in SGI movie format

Creating MPEG movies

To create an MPEG, you first need to create a series of individual frames. The procedure by which you do this with molecular graphics software will depend on the package. It is possible with RasMol, for example.

You then need to use MPEG-encoding software such as Berkeley Multimedia Research Center's mpeg_encode. Refer to the MPEG references in the list of URLs which accompanies this Section of the course.

Index to Course Material

Index to Section 6

Imagemaps

RasMol and Kinemages

Last updated 18th Mar '96