Zulko writes Python tutorials on video editing, GIFs, audio, animation, and ray tracing, and is the author of MoviePy.
HN mostly links to the MoviePy documentation, which commenters recommend as a tool for complex video operations in Python.
Possibly not what you're asking for, but I wrote a generally-accessible intro to why it can be tricky to assemble many DNA fragments with "Golden Gate Assembly", a mainstream method which relies on short sequence overhangs. The Sidewinder method discussed in this thread aims to solve that "short overhang" problem.
https://zulko.github.io/bricks_and_scissors/posts/overhangs/
The documentation shows ffmpeg is used only for encoding/decoding, composition/animation/effects are driven by openCV/numpy/scipy/PIL
See: https://zulko.github.io/moviepy/getting_started/quick_presentation.html#how-moviepy-works
The Gallery section has more advanced demos on vector/3D animations & audio mixing:
https://zulko.github.io/moviepy/gallery.html
That's awesome.
Every section on the command is simple, but taken as a whole, it is pretty thorny.
I find that MoviePy (https://zulko.github.io/moviepy/) is a great tool for more complex operations like the aboce. A lot of MoviePy's functionality is derived from an FFMPEG wrapper, but it is just easier to split things up into a small script.
I believe MoviePy uses ffmpeg underneath. Have not used ffmpeg-python, but MoviePy has nice higher-level abstractions like clips (both audio and video), time functions, transitions etc that you can then compose pretty elegantly. See some of the examples on their site:
https://zulko.github.io/moviepy/gallery.html
Have you tried moviepy? It works by converting matplotlib figures into numpy arrays (you can even pre-build a list of arrays and then just iterate over the list).
http://zulko.github.io/blog/2014/11/29/data-animations-with-python-and-moviepy/
This looks great! Two alternatives if you are interested in doing similar things in python are moviepy (https://zulko.github.io/moviepy/) and vidpy (which I am working on, and still has many issues: https://antiboredom.github.io/vidpy/)