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Video editing with Python

Project description

MoviePy (full documentation here) is a Python module for video editing: cuts, concatenations, title insertions, video compositing (a.k.a. non-linear editing), video processing, and creation of custom effects. See the gallery for some examples of use.

MoviePy can read and write all the most common audio and video formats, including GIF, and runs on Windows/Mac/Linux, with Python 2.7+ and 3. Here it is in action in an IPython notebook:



In this example we open a video file, select the subclip between t=50s and t=60s, add a title at the center of the screen, and write the result to a new file:

from moviepy.editor import *

video = VideoFileClip("myHolidays.mp4").subclip(50,60)

# Make the text. Many more options are available.
txt_clip = ( TextClip("My Holidays 2013",fontsize=70,color='white')
             .set_duration(10) )

result = CompositeVideoClip([video, txt_clip]) # Overlay text on video
result.write_videofile("myHolidays_edited.webm",fps=25) # Many options...

Contribute !

MoviePy is an open-source software originally written by Zulko and released under the MIT licence. The project is hosted on Github , where everyone is welcome to contribute, ask for help or simply give feedback.

You can also discuss about the project on Reddit or on the mailing list .


MoviePy depends on the Python modules Numpy, imageio, Decorator, and tqdm, which will be automatically installed during MoviePy’s installation. The software FFMPEG should be automatically downloaded/installed (by imageio) during your first use of MoviePy (it takes a few seconds). If you want to use a specific version of FFMPEG, follow the instructions in file In case of trouble, provide feedback.

Installation by hand: download the sources, either on PyPI or (if you want the development version) on Github, unzip everything in one folder, open a terminal and type

(sudo) python install

Installation with pip: if you have pip installed, just type this in a terminal:

(sudo) pip install moviepy

If you have neither setuptools nor ez_setup installed the command above will fail, is this case type this before installing:

(sudo) pip install ez_setup

Other optional but useful dependencies

ImageMagick is not strictly required, only if you want to write texts. It can also be used as a backend for GIFs but you can do GIFs with MoviePy without ImageMagick.

Once you have installed it, ImageMagick will be automatically detected by MoviePy, except on Windows !. Windows user, before installing MoviePy by hand, go into the moviepy/ file and provide the path to the ImageMagick binary called convert. It should look like this

IMAGEMAGICK_BINARY = "C:\\Program Files\\ImageMagick_VERSION\\convert.exe"

PyGame is needed for video and sound previews (useless if you intend to work with MoviePy on a server but really essential for advanced video editing by hand).

For advanced image processing you will need one or several of these packages. For instance using the method clip.resize requires that at least one of Scipy, PIL, Pillow or OpenCV are installed.

  • The Python Imaging Library (PIL) or, better, its branch Pillow .
  • Scipy (for tracking, segmenting, etc.), and can be used for resizing video clips if PIL and OpenCV aren’t installed on your computer.
  • Scikit Image may be needed for some advanced image manipulation.
  • OpenCV 2.4.6 or more recent (which provides the package cv2) may be needed for some advanced image manipulation.

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