xmovie: movies from xarray objects

A simple way of creating beautiful movies from xarray objects.

Rotating globe preset example. See First steps with xmovie.

Overview

With ever-increasing detail, modern scientific observations and model results lend themselves to visualization in the form of movies.

Not only is a beautiful movie a fantastic way to wake up the crowd on a Friday afternoon of a weeklong conference, but it can also speed up the discovery process, since our eyes are amazing image processing devices.

This module aims to facilitate movie rendering from data objects based on xarray objects.

Xarray already provides a way to create quick and beautiful static images from your data using Matplotlib. Various packages provide facilities for animating Matplotlib figures.

But it can become tedious to customize plots, particularly when map projections are used.

The main aims of this module are:

• Enable quick but high-quality movie frame creation from existing xarray objects with preset plot functions—create a movie with only 2 lines of code.

• Provide high quality, customizable presets to create stunning visualizations with minimal setup.

• Convert your static plot workflow to a movie with only a few lines of code, while maintaining all the flexibility of xarray and Matplotlib.

• Optionally, use Dask for parallelized frame rendering.

Installation

Note

For now, dask(-core) and cartopy are included with xmovie, but they may be optional dependencies in the future.

Conda

The easiest way to install xmovie is via conda:

conda install -c conda-forge xmovie

Pip

You can also install via pip:

pip install xmovie

Latest

If you want to install the latest version from GitHub, simply run

pip install git+https://github.com/jbusecke/xmovie.git

Note

If you dont have ssh keys set up, you can use

git clone https://github.com/jbusecke/xmovie.git`

and enter your github password.