Manim

Motivation

Creating animated content is hard. It always takes longer than you want and it is hard to edit to get right. For technical topics a wrong animation might be worse than useless, it could actively be misleading and waste people’s time.

Classic solution for technical slides is to create multiple static images and flip (or fade) from one slide to the next to show steps.

History

Originally designed by 3Blue1Brown YouTuber Grant Sanderson for creating his math videos.

Project was open sourced by Grant and developed by community. Currently two main forks, original and community. Original fork is backwards compatible with scripts from 3b1b code in older videos. Designed to match what is presented in videos exactly. New development is encouraged to use the community fork, which includes backwards incompatible changes and fixes. https://www.manim.community/

This presentation covers the community fork.

Implications: don’t copy Manim code from Grant’s videos directly and expect it to work. It will require minor fixes. Don’t copy/paste StackOverflow answers without checking which fork the answer applies to (answerers may be confused about this). It is currently not recommended to use general purpose LLMs trained on “the internet” for answering manim coding questions. Better to use LLMs trained on community fork documentation and examples.

Install

Linux

    # Start with installing uv (new-school python package tool)
    # https://docs.astral.sh/uv/getting-started/installation/
    curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

    # Start a uv project
    mkdir project
    cd project
    uv init

    # Make sure general dependencies are present
    sudo apt update
    sudo apt install build-essential python3-dev libcairo2-dev libpango1.0-dev

    # Add manim
    uv add manim

    # Optional install of TeX for math formulas
    sudo apt install texlive-full

Usage

Once manim is installed, you have a Python package you can import from Python code. You also have the manim command line tool.

Example code in file examples.py:

    from manim import *

    class CreateCircle(Scene):
        def construct(self):
            circle = Circle()  # create a circle
            circle.set_fill(PINK, opacity=0.5)  # set the color and transparency
            self.play(Create(circle))  # show the circle on screen

To see what it does:

    manim render -pql examples.py CreateCircle

This runs the example code and renders to a .mp4 file, then previews the video in a new window.

    -p      Preview the rendered video
    -ql     Choose low resolution quality

Quality levels:

    -ql     854x480 15FPS
    -qm     1280x720 30FPS
    -qh     1920x1080 60FPS
    -qp     2560x1440 60FPS
    -qk     3840x2160 60FPS

Usually the lowest quality level is fastest to render for development and is good enough to see what is happening. For presenting slides, medium quality is often adequate because of projector limitations. For publishing to YouTube high quality or higher is recommended.

The output file is stored in a location like media/videos/<filename>/<resolution>/<class>.mp4

Concepts

Docs link: https://docs.manim.community/en/stable/index.html

In your Python code, a Scene object represents an animated video. Within the Scene object there is a construct() method. Inside this method you create objects to display, add them to the Scene, and animate them.

Your Python code can define more than one class that inherits from Scene. You then can choose to render one or more of them from the command line manim.

Some Manim Limitations

One thing manim doesn’t do is compose multiple rendered animations into one video. If you have something like a talking head video of yourself explaining a concept and a manim animation of the concept, you probably want to use some sort of traditional video editor to merge both videos together. You might put the talking head in a corner of the concept animation, or cross-fade between a full screen talking head to the concept animation and back again.

If you have background audio you want to integrate into a manim animation (e.g. explanations) the easiest thing is to use a video editor and splice together the audio and video and adjusting the timings to get things to match up correctly.

If you are trying to fit a concept animation to an existing voice audio explanation, it is possible to add delays and timing to the manim python script but this can get tedious. There is no built-in graphical way to adjust timing.

Voiceovers

You can also use a tool in manim to generate/record voiceovers. The idea is you write text to say, put it in your scene. Then the voiceover plugin calls different TTS systems to generate artificial voice of your text. Once things are stable, you can use a command line flag to record your own voice and use it instead of the synthesized one.

https://voiceover.manim.community/en/latest/quickstart.html

Other ideas

There are lots of JavaScript libraries for making animations, many are spiritually an evolution of Flash. They often have a mix of programmatic animation and graphical animation editors.

https://motioncanvas.io/