How To: Save a Movie File

This page discusses how to save a movie using GaussView's Save Movie feature.

Initial Setup

In order to use this feature to create MP4 movies, you must first download and install a program that will allow GaussView to save the movie files to your computer. The program is called FFmpeg, and can be downloaded from https://ffmpeg.org/.

In this example, we will be installing FFmpeg on a Windows computer. The process is similar for other operating systems.

First, we open the FFmpeg website, and click on the Windows graphic (1 below).

An option will appear below, saying Windows Builds, which we then click on (2 below).

A new window will appear, bring you to the download page for the various FFmpeg programs. We are using a 64-bit Windows Operating System for this example, so we download the 64-bit Static version of FFmpeg. In general, we recommend downloading the static version of the program on all platforms.

Once the download has finished, we open the location of the file, which will be in a compressed zip format.

We open the zipped file to unzip the files.

The file we are interested in is ffmpeg.exe. In order to install it, we need to navigate to the GaussView 6 directory, and locate the bin folder. Drag the ffmpeg.exe executable from the unzipped file to the bin folder in GaussView 6.

Once this executable has been copied over to GaussView, the installation process is complete.

Creating a Normal Mode Animation Movie

Open a checkpoint file of the molecule you wish to save a movie of. Navigate to the Results=>Vibrations menu, and the options for starting an animation in GaussView, and saving a Movie, will appear as demonstrated in the picture below. It is important to note that you cannot save a movie using GaussView when an animation is currently being shown in the view window.

Using this menu, you can start and stop the animation in the GaussView window, in order to preview it before saving the video. Below the Start Animation and Save Movie... buttons are the options that you can use to modify the movie settings:

The Displacement Amplitude: slider determines how extreme the vibrations will be shown. Dragging it to the left will make the vibrations more subtle, while moving it to the right will make the vibrations more pronounced.

Below these controls are options to modify the information displayed with the animation. You can enable the displacement vectors and/or the dipole derivative unit vector as usual using the corresponding checkboxes, and control their length with the adjacent slider. The Displacement Amplitude slider controls the magnitude of the nuclear motion during the animation as usual.

You can preview the video by changing these sliders and clicking Start Animation. To save the movie, you select the Save Movie... menu. Select the Save Movie File... button from this dropdown. GaussView will open a dialog where you can navigate to where you want to save the movie file. The Save as type: field defaults to saving the movie as a .GIF file. Typically, one would select MPEG-4 Movie File (*.mp4), and save the file. GaussView will now save the file, using the normal Save File dialog.

Saving a Multiview Molecule Group as a Movie

Any molecule group containing multiple views can be animated using the green button in the top left of the view window. The down arrow to the right of the green button offers options for modifying the animation's characteristics.

Here, you can control how often, if at all, the animiation should repeat using the Repeats: button, how large the delay, in miliseconds, that each frame will be displayed using the Frame Delay (msec): button, and how long the delay between the animation loops should be using the Endpoint Delay (msec): button. The Sequence: button is used to play the animation backwards or forward, or combinations of the two.


To save the movie, you can select File=>Save Movie or click the Save Movie button from the toolbar. You then select the Save Movie File... button from this dropdown. GaussView will open a dialog where you can navigate to where you want to save the movie file. The Save as type: field defaults to saving the movie as a .GIF file. Generally, you will want to select MPEG-4 Movie File (*.mp4), and save the file. GaussView will now save the file using the he normal Save File dialog.