Recording Panda's display to a video format using FFmpeg

LittleCat · May 21, 2019, 12:34am

I was searching for a solution to directly capture footage within Panda3D. And while the base.movie function is nice (which saves an individual screenshot of every single frame), but I’d really prefer something that records in a video format wise.

A week or so ago, I’ve found this link containing a script that encodes into an AVI video:
http://pytan.hatenablog.com/entry/2015/07/21/223331

It works exactly what I wanted, but I have to fix some stuff, (like changing RGBA input into BGRA and changing codecs from AVI to H.264), but now I have a perfect solution I can use for recording stuff like cutscenes and machinimas within Panda itself without external software other than FFmpeg.

If any of this sounds useful to you, you can check out this gist I created here which records the Hello World demo from the manual into HelloWorld.mp4:

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/LittleToonCat/9f312f15e7e2b78956a2f40b7af29c08

HelloPandaRecord.py

import subprocess, platform, sys
from math import pi, sin, cos
 
from direct.showbase.ShowBase import ShowBase
from direct.task import Task
from direct.actor.Actor import Actor
from direct.interval.IntervalGlobal import Sequence
from panda3d.core import Point3, ClockObject

'''

This file has been truncated. show original

You can see the resulting output of the above script in YouTube here:

eldee · May 21, 2019, 8:50am

Thanks for sharing this

Also, I believe that if your app render the scene to texture you don’t have to use the screenshot function, instead you can directly store the content of the texture.