How to set the image resolution for animations?

Question

how can I set the resolution of an animation saved as mp4 movie with "matplotlib.animation" module? On the web I only found examples using "animation.FuncAnimation". For example the nice tutorial from http://jakevdp.github.com/blog/2012/08/18/matplotlib-animation-tutorial/ used: ``` anim = animation.FuncAnimation(fig, animate, init_func=init, frames=200, interval=20, blit=True) anim.save('basic_animation.mp4', fps=30, extra_args=['-vcodec', 'libx264']) ``` From the matplotlib.animation module reference I found the "animation.Animation.save" method providing a "dpi"-argument, but I don't know how to apply this function properly ``` matplotlib.animation.Animation.save(filename, writer=None, fps=None, dpi=None, codec=None, bitrate=None, extra_args=None, metadata=None, extra_anim=None) ``` A small example code may be helpful. Many thanks. Johannes PS: By the way, how can you insert Python-code with sytax-highlighting?

Accepted Answer

You can control the resolution in a round-about way. The resolution, figure size, and dpi are not all independent, if you know two of them, then the third is fixed.

You can set the `dpi` in the save argument, and before you save it, set the size of the figure with

```
fig.set_size_inches(w_in_inches, h_in_inches, True). 
```

Your resolution is then `dpi * w_in_inches X dpi * h_in_inches`.

```
dpi = 100
writer = animation.writers['ffmpeg'](fps=30)
ani.save('test.mp4',writer=writer,dpi=dpi)
```

You may need do upgrade to a newer version of mpl (debian is great because it is so conservative and awful because it is so conservative) from source.

How to set the image resolution for animations?

Solution

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