spectrometry.mp4 engines

The code behind the spectrometry.mp4 videos

Fluid sims, field lines, particle swarms, bouncing shapes and molecules. Written in Python, turned into video with ffmpeg. Free to use.

Hey! If you got here from one of my videos, you're in the right place. Nothing on the channel is animated by hand: a real simulation runs, and every frame it produces goes straight into the video. This repo is where I share the engines that do that, along with the scene scripts behind most of my videos, so you can render them yourself, pull them apart, and make your own things with them.

Find the engine behind a video

Tap the one that looks like what you saw.

Not public yet

These made some of my newer videos, but their code isn't cleaned up for sharing yet. They'll show up here when it is. Follow along on Instagram in the meantime.

Seen a video that isn't on either list? Ask which engine made it.

Try one in five minutes

You need Python 3.10 or newer and ffmpeg. A GPU makes things faster, but nothing needs one.

git clone https://github.com/ec175/spectrometry_public.git
cd spectrometry_public
python -m venv .venv

Turn the environment on. On Windows that's .venv\Scripts\activate; on macOS or Linux it's source .venv/bin/activate. Then pick one:

🌪️ Render one of my scenes. Every engine has a cli.py. This is the wind tunnel clip from the top of this page, at preview size:

pip install -r engines/wind-tunnel/src/requirements.txt
cd engines/wind-tunnel/src
python cli.py list
python cli.py tri_foil_air_fast --preview

Your video lands in engines/wind-tunnel/src/out/. Drop --preview for the full 1080×1920 version. Each engine page has a Render a video section with its own commands.

🎬 Make a molecule video. Chemical Profiles is a finished manim scene: one molecule and its spectra.

pip install -r chemical_profiles/requirements.txt
cd chemical_profiles
manim -ql -r 540,960 chemical_profile.py VerticalProfile_Aspirin

📺 Put the CRT look on your own clip. The Oscilloscope film filter works on any video you already have.

pip install -r engines/oscilloscope/src/requirements.txt
python engines/oscilloscope/src/filter_cli.py your_clip.mp4 filmed.mp4 --glitch 0.8

🧪 Play with a simulation. Every engine page starts with a short Start here section you can paste straight into Python. Wind Tunnel is a good first one.

Use it in your own stuff

Anyone can use this code, for videos, school projects, your own engine, whatever you like. It's MIT licensed. The only thing I ask is that you leave a trail back here:

1. Keep the two-line header at the top of any file you copy. The license needs it anyway.
2. Credit it in your project's README or your video's description:

   Made with spectrometry.mp4 engines by Clancy Earl - github.com/ec175/spectrometry_public
   

3. Or add the badge:

   [![made with spectrometry.mp4 engines](https://img.shields.io/badge/made%20with-spectrometry.mp4%20engines-ffc440?labelColor=0b0f14)](https://github.com/ec175/spectrometry_public)
   

If you post something you made, tag @spectrometry.mp4. I'd love to see it.

Using an AI coding agent? Point it at AGENTS.md. It explains how the repo fits together and how to credit it. For a formal citation, use CITATION.cff (on desktop, it's the Cite this repository button).

Questions

No. Every engine runs on a normal CPU. If you have an NVIDIA card, the engines that support it use it automatically for the maths (CuPy) and the video encoding (NVENC), and quietly fall back to the CPU if anything is missing. All the timings in these docs came from one RTX 2060 with an i7-9700K, so read them as rough ratios.

No. Most manim projects do, but the chemical profile scenes use plain text rendering (Pango) everywhere, so you can skip the whole LaTeX install.

Most of them, yes. The scene scripts for 78 of my compositions are in the engines' src/ folders, and python cli.py list shows them. Some are held back: scenes built on photos or music I don't own, the missile and ammunition studies, sets that aren't finished, and the "not public yet" engines above. Each engine's catalogue marks which scenes ship. My finished videos also have music and edits that aren't part of the engines.

Yes. Everything is written for vertical 1080×1920 because that's what I post, but the aspect ratio lives in each engine's RenderConfig, never in the physics. Wind Tunnel even has a right flow direction for the classic landscape tunnel.

No. They're representative simulations: peak positions come from literature values and group-contribution estimates, so they're good for learning and for video, but not for citing. Check against a real reference before you trust any band.

Open an issue with the command you ran and the full error. Most problems are either ffmpeg missing from your PATH or two engines sharing one virtual environment (use one per engine; Academia needs numpy<2).

engines/             one folder per engine: README, catalogue, stills, source
chemical_profiles/   a finished manim scene, the quickest way to a full video
docs/                the website, plus the preview clips on this page
tools/               rebuilds the catalogues and the stills pages
AGENTS.md            instructions for AI coding agents

More

• All engines: every engine on one page, plus the rules they all follow
• Full catalogue: 193 objects and 83 compositions, indexed
• Chemical Profiles guide: from install to your own molecule
• Website: the same gallery, as a page you can share