Combining the power of ffmpeg and Vimeo’s API to churn out videos at an incredible pace.

I recently had to solve an automation issue, where the client’s desire was to automatically generate hundreds of videos putting side by side a “base video” with a video picked from a list of hundreds. Whilst this could have easily been done by hand with one big effort, the project was an ongoing one, and the number of videos to generate was growing daily. For this reason, I decided to write a small script using Python and ffmpeg that would automatically generate and upload these videos to the client’s Vimeo channel.

This short article is meant to focus on some specific aspects of automation, video editing and Vimeo’s API, thus I won’t spend any time on the Python basics. I will focus on the few bits and bobs that I found challenging and I think are interesting to share. …