Except for extremely simple cases, drafting the movie is generally the most difficult and time-consuming part of the process. The general concept is to program and configure PyMOL so that it plays a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) draft of the movie that you can use to make design decisions before producing and compressing a movie file.

Depending on the complexity of your movie, PyMOL may be able to play the movie in near-realtime inside the viewer window. In other cases, PyMOL will only be able to provide a rough estimate of what the movie will look like once it is rendered.

Each of the following approaches can be used alone or in combination.

1. Storing generalized movie commands to perform timed actions.
2. Combining a series of Scenes.
3. Using mview to animate the camera and move objects.
4. Assembling Python blocks which automatically program the movie.
5. Controlling PyMOL explicitly using Python.