Animiotics vs ChimeraX and PyMOL movies

Movies in ChimeraX

UCSF ChimeraX is free for academic, government, nonprofit and personal use; commercial licenses start at $2,000 for a single user over three years. A toolbar button records simple spin movies. For more, the movie record and movie encode commands combine with turn, rock, morph, fly, crossfade and 2D labels in command scripts, and export MP4 and other formats.

Movies in PyMOL

PyMOL, maintained by Schrödinger, has an open-source version and a paid Incentive PyMOL build: $99 a year for an academic single user, $500 for an academic lab, from $1,050 for commercial users, and free for full-time students and their teachers. Movies are built from a frame timeline and keyframes with the mset and mview commands or the movie panel, and saved as MPEG or image frames.

Where Animiotics fits

Both tools excel at showing a structure accurately. Telling a story about it is harder: a membrane, a cell, several molecules interacting, camera moves, lighting and timing that carry an audience through a mechanism. That is weeks of scripting or 3D work, and it is what Animiotics does from a description.

Animiotics downloads the same PDB coordinates, or uses your files, and builds a cinematic 3D scene around them in the cloud. You can then look around, change objects and timing, and render video or stills.