BioExcel Webinar #49: Molecular movies made easy with Molywood (2020-10-22)

Many of us know the frustrations of preparing a scientific video for your latest article or presentation. When you want to share a particular perspective on your molecular system, a single graphics often just doesn’t cut it, but movie making always seems to be that arduous task we start from scratch over and over again, involving complex combinations of graphics design, coding skills and interfacing between a number of existing tools.

This webinar will introduce Molywood, a Python-based tool that intends to make movie-making fun and simple, shifting your focus from technical details to the creative process of designing a video. We introduced an intuitive syntax that lets you think in terms of actions and scenes, and made working with multiple panels or molecules feasible with little effort. Following the idea of making “easy things easy, and complex things possible”, the tool enables users to create an early draft in mere seconds, and then iterate the design to an arbitrary level to complexity, rendering the final result on an external machine if high quality is a must. We also provide a range of data visualization routines that can be used to augment the molecular picture with dynamically updated plots and graphs. On our website, the tool is complemented with installation instructions, a number of minimal examples, a gallery of highlights, and an extensive documentation including basic video tutorials.