Whether I’m building a little script, a web app, or doing machine learning, Python is always a handy little language to have in my toolbox.
As is the “Pythonic” way, there’s a package for everything and anything in Python, and video is no different.
In this quick guide, I’ll show you how to make a simple TikTok short video with just a few lines of code.
Getting started
To get started we’ll need 3 things:
Install a PIP library: “pip install moviepy”
Some background music, for this demo I am using: A soothing Piano soundtrack by Nicholas Panek
An animated GIF I whipped up in Canva.
Building our “movie maker” script
First, we need to load our “.gif” file:
video_clip = VideoFileClip(“./background.gif“)
Next, let’s load our audio file:
Finally, we add our sound to the GIF:
video_clip.write_videofile(“./video.mp4“, codec=‘libx264‘, fps=24)
video_clip.close()
bg_music.close()
And Voila! You should now have a video file (“video.mp4”) in the current directory with our final TikTok short.
Here’s the full script:
video_clip = VideoFileClip(“./background.gif“)
bg_music = AudioFileClip(“./piano.mp3“)
video_clip = video_clip.set_audio(bg_music)
video_clip.write_videofile(“./video.mp4“, codec=‘libx264‘, fps=24)
video_clip.close()
bg_music.close()
You can learn more about “moviepy” here: https://pypi.org/project/moviepy/
Tip: To shorten the audio so that it fits the video length:
.audio_loop(duration=video_clip.duration)
