Programmatically generate video or animated GIF in Python?

Question

I have a series of images that I want to create a video from. Ideally I could specify a frame duration for each frame but a fixed frame rate would be fine too. I'm doing this in wxPython, so I can render to a wxDC or I can save the images to files, like PNG. Is there a Python library that will allow me to create either a video (AVI, MPG, etc) or an animated GIF from these frames?

Edit: I've already tried PIL and it doesn't seem to work. Can someone correct me with this conclusion or suggest another toolkit? This link seems to backup my conclusion regarding PIL: http://www.somethinkodd.com/oddthinking/2005/12/06/python-imaging-library-pil-and-animated-gifs/

Answer 1

The python imaging library has an example that will do this for you:

http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/

The license is similar to a BSD license (free to use, must include copyright and license in supporting documentation).

Answer 2

Well, now I'm using ImageMagick. I save my frames as PNG files and then invoke ImageMagick's convert.exe from Python to create an animated GIF. The nice thing about this approach is I can specify a frame duration for each frame individually. Unfortunately this depends on ImageMagick being installed on the machine. They have a Python wrapper but it looks pretty crappy and unsupported. Still open to other suggestions.

Answer 3

It's not a python library, but mencoder can do that: Encoding from multiple input image files. You can execute mencoder from python like this:

import os

os.system("mencoder ...")

Answer 4

Have you tried PyMedia? I am not 100% sure but it looks like this tutorial example targets your problem.

Answer 5

I'm finding conflicting info about whether or not PIL will support creation of animated gifs.

Also, is PIL compatible with version 2.6?

Answer 6

To create a video, you could use opencv,

#load your frames
frames = ...
#create a video writer
writer = cvCreateVideoWriter(filename, -1, fps, frame_size, is_color=1)
#and write your frames in a loop if you want
cvWriteFrame(writer, frames[i])

Answer 7

As of June 2009 the originally cited blog post has a method to create animated GIFs in the comments. Download the script images2gif.py.

Then, to reverse the frames in a gif, for instance:

#!/usr/bin/env python

from PIL import Image, ImageSequence
import sys, os
filename = sys.argv[1]
im = Image.open(filename)
original_duration = im.info['duration']
frames = [frame.copy() for frame in ImageSequence.Iterator(im)]    
frames.reverse()

from images2gif import writeGif
writeGif("reverse_" + os.path.basename(filename), frames, duration=original_duration/1000.0, dither=0)