Recomendations Sought For MP4 Creation Program

[PatrickPowers]

I have a program written in Python geometric algebra that produces animations as mp4s. It is quite crude and I'm looking for something better. The requirements are:

Geometric algebra
Ability to draw ellipses.
Can produce standard MP4s.

I'll translate from Python to some other language if I must.

Blender has a Python interface but it is undocumented. I also prefer something much simpler than Blender.

[ICN5D]

It might be easier to find a process that gets you all of the still frames for the animation. Then, use another program to make the mp4 out of them.

[Embi]

I've been right where you are, searching for that middle ground to enhance Python-generated animations. Eventually, using a mix of more straightforward graphic libraries alongside Python gave me the control to create more sophisticated animations before making them MP4-ready.

When editing those MP4s, my experience with Movavi as an MP4 editor was seamless. It's a straightforward tool that works well on both Mac and Windows, and it is optional but not overcomplicated, either. I've used Movavi to crop, rotate, and trim my videos, which was incredibly handy. It's a user-friendly option that lets you focus on the creative side without getting entangled in unnecessary complexity.

[Keiji]

@Embi, as you have placed spam elsewhere on the website, I have removed the link from your post under suspicion this may be potentially unwanted software.

I have no experience with Movavi personally, if you wish to use it, feel free to search it and form your own opinion.

I would always suggest to use open source software where possible but this isn't an area where I have much relevant knowledge.

You might find Manim useful, this is an MIT-licensed tool to create videos from Python scripts. Again though, I don't know anything about it, but I have watched plenty of videos from 3blue1brown who wrote the original version of the software, as well as from other creators since, and found them very aesthetically pleasing.

[quickfur]

I second what ICN5D suggested: figure out a way to produce still frames of your animation first -- this will be the tricky part, you need to find software that can do the kind of math you describe and produce an image of it. Once you figure that out, write a script that will generate all the frames of your animation for you (trust me, you do not want to be generating individual frames by hand).

Once you have the still frames produced, there are many programs out there that can assemble them into animations and movies and what-not. I'm a Linux user, so I generally use Imagemagick or FFMpeg for this purpose. YMMV if you use another OS. But without a doubt there are tons of programs out there that will happily take an input set of images and produce a movie or animation from them.