How I write long Manim presentations: tips for a smoother experience

Sharing my setup and tips for writing long Manim (Slides) presentations!

Introduction

Recently, I completed another Manim Slides presentation, and I feel that my experience writing slides with Manim is becoming progressively smoother.

However, this wasn’t always the case, especially in my early days of using Manim. Additionally, Manim Slides—the tool I developed to generate slides from Manim videos—has evolved significantly since its creation, offering many more options for rapid slide development than its earlier versions.

When browsing the Manim subreddit and Discord server, I often see people asking for tips on reducing animation rendering time. This blog post shares my experience rendering Manim animations and provides practical tips to streamline your workflow and minimize time spent waiting for slides to render.

I’ve split this guide into multiple sections, each addressing key aspects to consider when using Manim. The final section provides additional tips specific to preparing slides. I also recommend checking out the code of my Manim Slides presentations, a link is provided in each blog post.

This tutorial is based on ManimCE, but most of its content is also applicable to users of ManimGL.

Environment setup

Creating a Manim presentation is an iterative process, often requiring multiple refinements before you achieve the desired outcome. To make this process as smooth as possible, setting up a robust development environment is essential.

Use a virtual environment and pin dependencies

To avoid compatibility issues, always use a virtual environment and explicitly define your dependencies in a pyproject.toml file (or requirements.txt). Manim often introduces breaking changes between versions, so I strongly recommend using strict versioning, e.g., manim==0.19 instead of simply manim. Here’s an example setup:

[dependency-groups]
dev = [ 
  # Includes the Qt GUI for debugging presentations
  "manim-slides[manim,pyside6]==5.5.1",
]

[project]
dependencies = [
  "choreographer<1",
  "kaleido==0.2.1",
  # ManimCE version auto-defined from Manim Slides
  "manim-slides[manim]==5.5.1",
  "pandas>=2.2.3",
  "pillow>=11.1.0",
  "plotly>=5.24.1,<6",
  "scipy>=1.15.1",
]
description = "Add your description here"
name = "name-of-your-presentation"
requires-python = ">=3.11"
version = "0.1.0"

To manage your virtual environment, I recommend uv, but many other options exist!

Use version control

Long presentations involve extensive revisions, so I highly recommend using a version control system like Git. This allows you to track changes, revert mistakes, and restore previous versions if something goes wrong.

This post isn’t a Git tutorial, but I recommend checking out W3Schools’ Git Tutorial.

Use formatting and linting tools

Manim projects can get messy. To keep your code readable and maintainable, use auto-formatting and linting tools like:

• Black: Automatically formats Python code;
• Flake8: Catches potential bugs and style inconsistencies;
• isort: Ensures consistent import ordering;
• Ruff: My favorite tool, as it combines formatting, linting, and more at lightning speed!

Even though these tools don’t impact the rendering performance directly, they help you maintain a clean and structured codebase, making debugging much easier.

Manim rendering strategies

By default, animations are rendered at a relatively high quality. While Manim¹ provides a caching mechanism, it is usually not necessary to render everything when creating slides.

Instead, it is beneficial to split the whole video (or presentation) into indenpendant parts, and render them separately at a lower resolution for a faster development experience.

Below are a few strategies I often take to reduce Manim offers various rendering options that can significantly affect performance. Here are some ways to optimize rendering times:

Use Low-Resolution Previews

Instead of rendering everything at full quality, use:

manim -ql --fps=10 your_script.py YourClass

Warning: Setting an FPS too low may cause animations to appear choppy.

Adding --preview will automatically open a video player after² rendering.

Only render the presentation in high quality with it is ready, and full HD is usually sufficient for most applications.

Manim Slides for Presentations

If you’re using Manim for PowerPoint-like presentations, I recommend my library, Manim Slides, as it provides many nice output formats for presenting your slides, as well as a few useful utilities for animating slides, see the reference documentation.

Here are a few Manim Slides-specific tips:

1. Skip rendering reversed animations if they are not needed: By default, reversed slides are generated, which increases the rendering time. However, reversed animations are not always desired, especially as they are not use by all output formats, such as PPTX or HTML. You can disable rendering reversed slides with:

   from manim import *
   from manim_slides import Slide
     
   class Presentation(Slide):
       skip_reversing = True
       def construct(self):
           self.play(...)
   

   You can find more options in the API documentation;

2. Use relative Mobject positioning: This is not unique to slides, but prefer positioning your objects relative to each other (e.g., using next_to() method) instead of using absolute coordinates. The motivation is that you never know the final position of each object in the canvas, because you can always add or remove slides in between. Using relative coordinates help mitigate the issue of having to correct the coordinates of objects. A good example of relative positioning combined with MovingCameraScene is my EuCAP 2025 presentation.

Keep Slides Modular

Instead of writing one long construct() method, break your presentation into smaller, reusable functions:

from manim import *

class Presentation(Scene):
    def construct(self):
        self.introduction()
        self.explain_concepts()
        self.show_final_result()

    def introduction(self):
        self.play(...)

    def explain_concepts(self):
        self.play(...)

    def show_final_result(self):
        self.play(...)

Then, you can comment out sections during testing to speed up debugging:

# self.introduction()
self.explain_concepts()
# self.show_final_result()

Alternatively, define separate classes for each section:

class Introduction(Scene):
    def construct(self):
        ...

class ExplainConcepts(Scene):
    def construct(self):
        ...

class ShowFinalResults(Scene):
    def construct(self):
        ...

Then, render only the scene you need from the command line.

Skip Animations

Manim allows you to skip rendering some animations, either from the command line:

manim render your_file.py YourClass -na,b

to render from animation number a to animation number b. Or from the code itself,

class Presentation(Scene):
    def construct(self):
        self.next_section(skip_animations=True)
        self.play(...)  # This is skipped
        self.next_section()
        self.play(...)  # This isn't

to skip all animations within a section³.

If you are using Manim Slides, we instead recommend the following:

self.next_slide(skip_animations=True)

Or globally skip animations until further notice:

self.start_skip_animations()
... # Animations here will be skipped
self.stop_skip_animations()

Avoid Overusing TeX

Rendering Tex objects repeatedly slows things down. If LaTeX typesetting isn’t required, prefer Text objects.

Additional Tips

• Set your computer to high performance mode: Rendering is a CPU- and GPU-intensive task, so don’t forget to put your computer in high performance mode (modern computers have a CPU frequency that can be changed) and plug it in, as it will probably drain your battery;
• Cache expensive objects: If an object takes a long time to generate, consider caching it;
• Pre-render static content: If some elements remain unchanged, render them once and reuse them;
• Use placeholder objects: During development, replace complex objects with simple placeholders (e.g., a Dot());
• Debug outside Manim: If a TeX formula fails, test it in a .tex file first.

Conclusion

Creating Manim presentations efficiently requires good coding habits, a solid development environment, and smart rendering strategies. By following these tips, you’ll significantly improve your workflow and spend less time waiting for renders.

If you have any question, please feel free to use the comments section! For bugs report, post an issue on the appropriate GitHub repository.

I hope you enjoyed this post and that you learned a few nice things that you could apply to your own workflow!

1. To my best knowledge, only ManimCE provides animations caching, not ManimGL. ↩

2. When using the OpenGL renderer, the preview will open a window during rendering, and show the progress in real time. ↩

3. Sections are only available with ManimCE (and Manim Slides). ↩