Simple countdown video in Python

So, in a month from now I’m going to participate at the 3 Minute Thesis contest at my university. As one can deduct by its name, the whole idea is presenting your PhD subject in only 3 minutes.

For practicing, I created a simple countdown video using Python, obviously it goes from 180 to 0. For that, I had to install FFMpeg so I could save in a different format than the HTML provided by the matplotlib’s Animation module when you have no real video writer available. The simplest way was just using the conda environment (the one I use for my Python coding):

conda install -c menpo ffmpeg

The idea is just make one frame per second, so FPS = 1, where each one of them is a centered text with the correspoding time, no axis. The bitrate could be reduced, to make a smaller video. As it’s just a simple countdown, there is not any major losses in the quality with a bitrate of 80 (but reduced from 2.44 MB to 1.82 MB). So the writer options were:

    FFMpegWriter = animation.writers['ffmpeg']
    writer = FFMpegWriter(fps=1,
                          codec='mpeg4',
                          bitrate=80)

Using the default codec, it was running fine with the VLC player. Just to make it more general for sharing with my colleagues, I tried with Windows Media Player, and it was quite awful. So I just picked the MPEG-4 codec (as you can see in the previous extrait of the program), from the list of available codecs that you can see by typing in your terminal:

ffmpeg -codecs

A good improvement would be adding a bip when you reach 0 or something close to that. For the moment, the text color just changes to red.
You can check the complete script here: simple_countdown.py

If you got in here because you are also practicing for something similar, I hope this scripts helps you and wish you good luck. Once I do my presentation, I’ll problably put the video here, so stay tuned!