I would like to create an h264 or divx movie from frames that I generate in a python script in matplotlib. There are about 100k frames in this movie.
In examples on the web [eg. 1], I have only seen the method of saving each frame as a png and then running mencoder or ffmpeg on these files. In my case, saving each frame is impractical. Is there a way to take a plot generated from matplotlib and pipe it directly to ffmpeg, generating no intermediate files?
Programming with ffmpeg's C-api is too difficult for me [eg. 2]. Also, I need an encoding that has good compression such as x264 as the movie file will otherwise be too large for a subsequent step. So it would be great to stick with mencoder/ffmpeg/x264.
Is there something that can be done with pipes [3]?
[1] http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/examples/animation/movie_demo.html
[2] How does one encode a series of images into H264 using the x264 C API?
This functionality is now (at least as of 1.2.0, maybe 1.1) baked into matplotlib via the MovieWriter class and it's sub-classes in the animation module. You also need to install ffmpeg in advance.
import matplotlib.animation as animation
import numpy as np
from pylab import *
dpi = 100
def ani_frame():
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
ax.set_aspect('equal')
ax.get_xaxis().set_visible(False)
ax.get_yaxis().set_visible(False)
im = ax.imshow(rand(300,300),cmap='gray',interpolation='nearest')
im.set_clim([0,1])
fig.set_size_inches([5,5])
tight_layout()
def update_img(n):
tmp = rand(300,300)
im.set_data(tmp)
return im
#legend(loc=0)
ani = animation.FuncAnimation(fig,update_img,300,interval=30)
writer = animation.writers['ffmpeg'](fps=30)
ani.save('demo.mp4',writer=writer,dpi=dpi)
return ani