Freezing a movie frame with a painting effect

That’s an effect that we have seen a lot in westerns and such.

The recipe used to make a photo look like a painting:

  • Find the edges of the image with the Sobel algorithm. You obtain what looks like a black and white hand-drawing of the photo.
  • Multiply the image array to make the colors flashier, and add the contours obtained at the previous step.

The final clip will be the concatenation of three part: the part before the effect, the part with the effect, and the part after the effect. The part with the effect is obtained as follows:

  • Take the frame to freeze and make a “painted image” of it. Make it a clip.
  • Add a text clip saying “Audrey” to the “painted image” clip.
  • Overlay the painted clip over the original frame, but make it appear and disappear with a fading effect.

Here you are for the code:

""" requires scikit-image installed (for vfx.painting) """
 
from moviepy.editor import *

# WE TAKE THE SUBCLIPS WHICH ARE 2 SECONDS BEFORE & AFTER THE FREEZE

charade = VideoFileClip("../../videos/charade.mp4")
tfreeze = cvsecs(19.21) # Time of the freeze, 19'21

# when using several subclips of a same clip, it can be faster
# to create 'coreaders' of the clip (=other entrance points).
clip_before = charade.coreader().subclip(tfreeze -2,tfreeze)
clip_after = charade.coreader().subclip(tfreeze ,tfreeze +2)


# THE FRAME TO FREEZE

im_freeze = charade.to_ImageClip(tfreeze)
painting = (charade.fx( vfx.painting, saturation = 1.6,black = 0.006)
                   .to_ImageClip(tfreeze))
                 
txt = TextClip('Audrey',font='Amiri-regular',fontsize=35)

painting_txt = (CompositeVideoClip([painting,txt.set_pos((10,180))])
                   .add_mask()
                   .set_duration(3)
                   .crossfadein( 0.5)
                   .crossfadeout( 0.5))

# FADEIN/FADEOUT EFFECT ON THE PAINTED IMAGE

painting_fading = CompositeVideoClip([im_freeze,painting_txt])

# FINAL CLIP AND RENDERING

final_clip =  concatenate_videoclips([ clip_before,
                            painting_fading.set_duration(3),
                            clip_after])

final_clip.write_videofile('../../audrey.avi',fps=charade.fps,
                        codec = "mpeg4", audio_bitrate="3000k")