When preparing molecular animations—whether for a presentation, publication, or educational video—timing is crucial. A brief pause at just the right moment can give your audience the time to absorb complex molecular conformations, understand a transition, or appreciate a molecular interaction. Yet many molecular modelers skip this simple but effective step.
Fortunately, SAMSON makes it easy to add pauses in your animation timeline with the Pause animation effect. This feature lets you freeze your animation at a specific frame, holding the scene steady for a designated number of seconds. It’s a subtle addition that can make a big difference in clarity and pacing.
What Pain Does This Solve?
Molecular animations often feature continuous transitions between different states or conformations. While smooth movement is visually appealing, it doesn’t always serve scientific communication. Rapid transitions can overwhelm viewers, especially when you’re presenting intricate molecular mechanisms or structural differences.
The Pause effect addresses this by allowing you to create still moments—giving your audience time to absorb details at critical frames. Instead of manually capturing screenshots or editing videos post-process, let SAMSON do the work for you directly on the timeline.
How to Add a Pause Effect
To insert a Pause in your animation, simply open the Animation panel in SAMSON’s Animator. Then:
- Double-click on the Pause effect.
- A keyframe will be placed at your current position in the timeline (you can move it afterward).
Note: You can always reposition the Pause keyframe according to your timing needs.
Customizing Pause Duration
Select the Pause animation node in the Document view and inspect it in the Inspector. This gives you access to the duration property, which you can easily modify to control how long the Pause lasts.
This level of customization makes it easy to choreograph your animation precisely: pause just before a reaction starts, at the highest point of an energy profile, or right after a docking event, and let your audience see—and think—before continuing the motion.
When to Use Pauses
Consider adding Pause effects when:
- Highlighting a key interaction or binding event.
- Explaining complex conformational changes.
- Transitioning between different visualization modes (e.g., showing secondary structure before switching to surface rendering).
- Comparing different molecules or states side-by-side.
These examples help create a rhythm in your animation that guides the audience through your story, rather than overwhelming them with nonstop motion.
To learn more, visit the full documentation page here: https://documentation.samson-connect.net/users/latest/animations/pause/.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can download SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.