manim/docs/source/tutorials/a_deeper_look.md

A deeper look

[NOTE:] this is some text I wrote that was originally meant to be part of the quickstart. However, after some thought I've decided that it's probably a bit too much for the quickstart, as the quickstart document is supposed to showcase the quickest way of getting up and running with manim. I've moved it here for now, but feel free to edit/delete/move this text elsewhere in the documentation.

A deeper look

Let's dissect what just happened step by step. First, the following command

$ manim scene.py SquareToCircle -pl

executes manim on the file scene.py, which contains our animation code. Further, this command tells manim exactly which Scene to be rendered, in this case it is SquareToCircle. A single scene file may contain more than one scene. Next, the flag -p tells manim to play the scene once it's rendered, and the -l flag tells manim to render the scene in low quality.

After the video is rendered, you will see that manim has generated some new files and the project folder will look as follows.

project/
├─scene.py
└─media
  ├─videos
  |  └─scene
  |     └─480p15
  |        ├─SquareToCircle.mp4
  |        └─partial_movie_files
  ├─text
  └─Tex

There are quite a few new files. The main output is in media/videos/scene/480p15/SquareToCircle.mp4. By default, the media folder will contain all of manim's output files. The media/videos subfolder contains the rendered videos. Inside of it, you will find one folder for each different video quality. In our case, since we used the -l flag, the video was generated at 480p at 15 frames per second from the scene.py file. Therefore, the output can be found inside media/videos/scene/480p15. The additional folders media/videos/scene/480p15/partial_movie_files as well as media/text and media/Tex contain files that are used by manim internally.

You can see how manim makes use of the generated folder structure by executing the following command,

$ manim scene.py SquareToCircle -pk

The -l flag (for low quality) has been replaced by the -k flag, for 4K quality. Manim will take considerably longer to render this file, and it will play it once it's done since we are using the -p flag. The output should look like this: [NOTE:] Output currently removed, because on a normal non 4k screen the scene is to big to be displayed.

And the folder structure should look as follows.

project/
├─scene.py
└─media
  ├─videos
  | └─scene
  |   ├─480p15
  |   | ├─SquareToCircle.mp4
  |   | └─partial_movie_files
  |   └─2160p60
  |     ├─SquareToCircle.mp4
  |     └─partial_movie_files
  ├─text
  └─Tex

Manim has created a new folder media/videos/2160p60, which corresponds to the resolution and the 60 frames per second corresponding to 4k quality. Inside of it, you can find the new SquareToCircle.mp4, as well as the corresponding partial_movie_files.