oiao / pltmov

Pyplot to FFmpeg wrapper for easy animation of plots and figures

This package provides a wrapper around ffmpeg, allowing for fast conversion of your pyplot plots into a movie file.

Installation

• git clone https://github.com/oiao/pltmov.git
• pip install -e pltmov

How to use

1. Import and initialize a Movie instance

from pltmov import Movie
movie = Movie()

2. Define your plotting function as usual, but use the instance's record decorator

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

@movie.record
def plot(xmax, text):
    x = np.linspace(0, xmax, int(np.sqrt(xmax)*100))
    plt.plot(x, np.sin(x))
    plt.text(0.1, 0.1, str(text), transform=plt.gca().transAxes, size=18)
    plt.tight_layout()

Make sure that:

• your plotting function does not save anything to disk
• there are no keyword arguments in the function

3. Each call to the plotting function is now recorded as a frame in your movie

ranges = np.linspace(0.1,  100, 1000) # 1k frames
texts  = [f"frame {i}" for i in range(1, len(ranges)+1)]
for r, t in zip(ranges,texts):
    plot(r, t)

4. Save your movie

movie.write('movie.mp4', fps=60)

All arguments for write() are documented in the docstring.