I wrote the following code:
from moviepy.editor import *
from PIL import Image
clip= VideoFileClip("video.mp4")
video= CompositeVideoClip([clip])
video.write_videofile("video_new.mp4",fps=clip.fps)
then to check whether the frames have changed or not and if changed, which function changed them, i retrieved the first frame of 'clip', 'video' and 'video_new.mp4' and compared them:
clip1= VideoFileClip("video_new.mp4")
img1= clip.get_frame(0)
img2= video.get_frame(0)
img3= clip1.get_frame(0)
a=img1[0,0,0]
b=img2[0,0,0]
c=img3[0,0,0]
I found that a=24, b=24, but c=26....infact on running a array compare loop i found that 'img1' and 'img2' were identical but 'img3' was different. I suspect that the function video.write_videofile is responsible for the change in array. But i dont know why...Can anybody explain this to me and also suggest a way to write clips without changing their frames?
PS: i read the docs of 'VideoFileClip', 'FFMPEG_VideoWriter', 'FFMPEG_VideoReader' but could not find anything useful...I need to read the exact frame as it was before writing in a code I'm working on. Please, suggest me a way.
Like JPEG, MPEG-4 uses lossy compression, so it's not surprising that the frames read from "video_new.mp4" are not perfectly identical to those in "video.mp4". And as well as the variations caused purely by the lossy compression there are also variations that arise due to the wide variety of encoding options that can be used by programs that write MPEG data.
If you really need to be able to read back the exact same frame data that you write then you will have to use a different file format, but be warned: your files will be huge!
The choice of video format partly depends on what the image data is like and on what you want to do with it. If the data uses 256 colours or less, and you don't intend to perform transformations on it that will modify the colours, a simple GIF anim is a good choice. But bear in mind that even something like non-integer scaling modifies colours.
If you want to analyze the image data and transform it in various ways, it makes sense to use a format with better colour support than GIF, eg a stream of PNG images, which I assume is what Zulko mentions in his answer. FWIW, there's an anim format related to PNG called MNG, but it is not well supported or widely known.
Another option is to use a stream of PPM images, or maybe even a stream of YUV data, which is useful for certain kinds of analysis and convenient if you do intend to encode as MPEG for final consumption. The PPM format is very simple and easy to work with; YUV is slightly messy since it's a raw format with no header data, so you have to keep track of the image size and resolution data yourself.
The file size of PPM or YUV streams is large, since they incorporate no compression at all, but of course they can be compressed using standard compression techniques, if you want to save a little space when saving them to disk. OTOH, typical video processing workflows that use such streams often don't bother writing them to disk: they are sent in pipelines (perhaps using named pipes), so the file size is (mostly) irrelevant.
Although such formats take up a lot of space compared to MPEG-based files, they are far superior for use as intermediate formats while performing image data analysis and transformation, since every time you write & read back MPEG you are losing a little bit of quality.
I assume that you intend to do your image data analysis and transformations using PIL/Pillow. But you can also work with PPM & YUV streams using the ffmpeg / avconv command line programs; and the ffmpeg family happily work with sets of individual image files and GIF anims, too.