mplcamera 0.0.2

Camera Class to make snapshots of a figure and save a gif from stored images

mplcamera

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This package is adapted from https://github.com/jwkvam/celluloid.

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Instead of capturing a figures artists like celluloid does, mplcamera takes an image snapshot of the whole figure. This has the advantage that

• all plot contents should be captured
• we have the opportunity to use savefig keyword arguments like facecolor and bbox_inches.

Further, using imageio to save a gif provides the opportunity for using mimsave_kwargs:

• to define a duration between frames in seconds, either as int, or as a list individually for each frame.
• we can set the loop to 1 (gif animation stops after 1 loop) or any other amount of loops.

Disadvantages:

• Saving the images takes a little more time than with mplcamera.
• It might be memory intensive to store a lot of images in memory.

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The goal of this package is to provide a simple way to create gifs that can be used for example

• to show the creation process of a plot
• to aid visual storytelling by being able to focus longer on individual frames, which allows to show annotations only for that time (simply remove them after you snap the frame.)

Installation

pip install mplcamera

Usage

The usage remains the same as with celluloid:

1. instantiate a Camera from a figure

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from mplcamera import Camera
fig = plt.figure()
cam = Camera(fig)

2. After each step of plotting take snapshots of the figure

cam.snap()

3. save the snapshots to a gif

cam.save('animation.gif')

Example:

    import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
    from mplcamera import Camera

    fig, ax = plt.subplots()
    ax.set_ylim(-0.25, 3.25)

    cam = Camera(fig)
    for i in range(4):
        plt.plot([i] * 10)
        cam.snap()

    # use a different duration for frame 3. use loop=1 to not loop the gif
    mimsave_kwargs = {'duration': [0.25, 0.25, 1, 0.25], 'loop': 0}

    cam.save('mpl_camera_animation.gif', **mimsave_kwargs)