Download and Installation

Installation

Method with pip: if you have pip installed, just type this in a terminal (it will install ez_setup if you don’t already have it)

(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

Method 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 setup.py install

MoviePy depends on the Python modules Numpy, imageio, Decorator, and tqdm, which will be automatically installed during MoviePy’s installation. It should work on Windows/Mac/Linux, with Python 2.7+ and 3 ; if you have trouble installing MoviePy or one of its dependencies, please provide feedback !

MoviePy depends on the software FFMPEG for video reading and writing. You don’t need to worry about that, as 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, you can set the FFMPEG_BINARY environment variable See moviepy/config_defaults.py for details.

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/config_defaults.py file and provide the path to the ImageMagick binary called magick. It should look like this

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

You can also set the IMAGEMAGICK_BINARY environment variable See moviepy/config_defaults.py for details.

If you are using an older version of ImageMagick, keep in mind the name of the executable is not magick.exe but convert.exe. In that case, the IMAGEMAGICK_BINARY property should be 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 (provides the package cv2) or more recent may be needed for some advanced image manipulation.

If you are on linux, these packages will likely be in your repos.