Making movies with VMD/PyMol

These two scripts help greatly in making and handling movies. I need scripts instead of the GUI because most of my data is on machines on the other coast and it gets rather cumbersome to pull a gigantic trajectory file just to see a quick snapshot of the system. I could make PDB (or better dcd) files of parts of trajectory I am interested in, but I will need to make movies at some point.

view_change_render.tcl
trajectory_movie.tcl
http://www.myofilament.org/documents/howto/modeling/VMD_Tcl.htm

PyMol uses get_view and "set view" commands to save and retrieve views of molecules. VMD handles things a little differently. It needs 4 parameters per view. They are [rotate/center/scale/global]_matrix. Saving and retrieving are done by processes below. They have been taken from view_change_render.tcl
I added the last part get_vp to see what the view point actually looks like (similar to get_view in PyMol).

proc save_vp {view_num} {
  global viewpoints
  if [info exists viewpoints($view_num)] {unset viewpoints($view_num)}
  # get the current matricies
  foreach mol [molinfo list] {
    set viewpoints($view_num,$mol,0) [molinfo $mol get rotate_matrix]
    set viewpoints($view_num,$mol,1) [molinfo $mol get center_matrix]
    set viewpoints($view_num,$mol,2) [molinfo $mol get scale_matrix]
    set viewpoints($view_num,$mol,3) [molinfo $mol get global_matrix]
  }
} 

 proc retrieve_vp {view_num} {
  global viewpoints
  foreach mol [molinfo list] {
    if [info exists viewpoints($view_num,$mol,0)] {
      molinfo $mol set rotate_matrix   $viewpoints($view_num,$mol,0)
      molinfo $mol set center_matrix   $viewpoints($view_num,$mol,1)
      molinfo $mol set scale_matrix   $viewpoints($view_num,$mol,2)
      molinfo $mol set global_matrix   $viewpoints($view_num,$mol,3)
    } else {
      puts "View $view_num was not saved"}
  }
}

 proc get_vp {view_num} {
  global viewpoints
  foreach mol [molinfo list] {
    if [info exists viewpoints($view_num,$mol,0)] {
puts "global viewpoints"
puts "molinfo $mol set rotate_matrix     \"$viewpoints($view_num,$mol,0)\""
puts "molinfo $mol set center_matrix     \"$viewpoints($view_num,$mol,1)\""
puts "molinfo $mol set scale_matrix      \"$viewpoints($view_num,$mol,2)\""
puts "molinfo $mol set global_matrix     \"$viewpoints($view_num,$mol,3)\""
    } else {
      puts "View $view_num was not saved"}
  }
}

Once you save this output (as a text file) it becomes very easy to retrieve the view even 

after closing down VMD. Simply copy and paste the output of get_vp.