I a previous post, I outlined how to embed a Matplotlib Animation directly in the Jupyter Notebook as a HTML5 video. In this notebook, we take the same Animation and save it as a GIF using Imagemagick. First, let us reproduce the FuncAnimation object from the notebook.

%matplotlib inline

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

from matplotlib import animation, rc
from IPython.display import HTML, Image

# equivalent to rcParams['animation.html'] = 'html5'
rc('animation', html='html5')

# First set up the figure, the axis, and the plot element we want to animate
fig, ax = plt.subplots()

ax.set_xlim(( 0, 2))
ax.set_ylim((-2, 2))

line, = ax.plot([], [], lw=2)

# initialization function: plot the background of each frame
def init():
    line.set_data([], [])
    return (line,)

# animation function. This is called sequentially
def animate(i):
    x = np.linspace(0, 2, 1000)
    y = np.sin(2 * np.pi * (x - 0.01 * i))
    line.set_data(x, y)
    return (line,)

# call the animator. blit=True means only re-draw the parts that 
# have changed.
anim = animation.FuncAnimation(fig, animate, init_func=init,
                               frames=100, interval=20, blit=True)

anim

Now, we just need to save the animation instance with writer=imagemagick. But before we do that, we first make sure imagemagick has been properly installed on our system.

!brew install imagemagick

Warning: imagemagick-7.0.4-6 already installed

Now we can go ahead and save it as a GIF.

anim.save('../../files/animation.gif', writer='imagemagick', fps=60)

Finally, let's read it back in and display it to make sure it saved as expected.

Image(url='../../../animation.gif')