What we really need is an animation tutorial/explanation. This should explain the logic of animations and could then also have a section on saving to file. The individual examples should link to the tutorial for further information.

Labeling good first issue because this is relatively simple and stand alone. Also agree we need a user level "how to animate" tutorial, but I think this example can be generated independent of that.

This sounds interesting. Any suggestions on what animation we would want to use for this example?

I think something small like moving a scatter dot across the page - it's not documented as its own thing like line is (https://matplotlib.org/devdocs/gallery/animation/simple_anim.html#sphx-glr-gallery-animation-simple-anim-py) but is fairly small so won't distract from the save as gif? (plus it works really well as an infinite gif)

ETA: https://matplotlib.org/devdocs/gallery/animation/rain.html#sphx-glr-gallery-animation-rain-py has how to animate scatter, it's just the complex version

No worries I'll have a look at it and try mock something up.

Hey,

Are we thinking something simple like this? (it moves faster and smoother when run from the terminal)

Also what would be the best way we want to write the save to gif as?

# To save the animation, use e.g.
#
# ani.save("movie.mp4")
#
# or
#
# writer = animation.FFMpegWriter(
#     fps=15, metadata=dict(artist='Me'), bitrate=1800)
# ani.save("movie.mp4", writer=writer)

Something like the above?

Cheers,
Kostya

@story645

that works for me, except the save has to be explicitly using pillow as the writer and the two examples you have are the built in mp4 and ffmpeg.

https://matplotlib.org/stable/api/_as_gen/matplotlib.animation.PillowWriter.html?highlight=pillow#matplotlib.animation.PillowWriter

No worries I'll have a look into it and post the code block here. Thanks.

@story645

How does this look?

# To save the animation using Pillow as a gif, use e.g.
#
# writer = animation.PillowWriter(fps=15,
#                                 metadata=dict(artist='Me'),
#                                 bitrate=1800)
# ani.save('scatter.gif', writer=writer)

I'm not sure if it needs to be in comments

Sure thing I can uncomment in the code.

@story645 just had a thought if it's not in comments when the docs are built will the code generate an image if it has ani.save('scatter.gif', writer=writer) uncommented?

Might be better to comment out then?

Now that the animation tutorial has been merged, do we still need to keep this issue open?

This is now covered in https://matplotlib.org/devdocs/users/explain/animations/animations.html#saving-animations