Programmatically generate video or animated GIF in Python?

Question

I have a series of images that I want to create a video from. Ideally I could specify a frame duration for each frame but a fixed frame rate would be fine too. I'm doing this in wxPython, so I can render to a wxDC or I can save the images to files, like PNG. Is there a Python library that will allow me to create either a video (AVI, MPG, etc) or an animated GIF from these frames?

Edit: I've already tried PIL and it doesn't seem to work. Can someone correct me with this conclusion or suggest another toolkit? This link seems to backup my conclusion regarding PIL: http://www.somethinkodd.com/oddthinking/2005/12/06/python-imaging-library-pil-and-animated-gifs/

Answer 1

I'd recommend not using images2gif from visvis because it has problems with PIL/Pillow and is not actively maintained (I should know, because I am the author).

Instead, please use imageio, which was developed to solve this problem and more, and is intended to stay.

Quick and dirty solution:

import imageio
images = []
for filename in filenames:
    images.append(imageio.imread(filename))
imageio.mimsave('/path/to/movie.gif', images)

For longer movies, use the streaming approach:

import imageio
with imageio.get_writer('/path/to/movie.gif', mode='I') as writer:
    for filename in filenames:
        image = imageio.imread(filename)
        writer.append_data(image)