An exploration of Thomas Edisons films

Alvarop

Hi guys,

I've been playing around with processing a lot lately and I made my first video with it. Let me know what you think, I'd really appreciate some feedback.

Not sure if the video is showing up, but here's the link https://vimeo.com/166587599

quark

Looks really neat. Is the video done in real time? Would be nice to give an overview of how you did it so others can experiment with the technique.

Alvarop

Thanks! The video is not run in real time, it's actually pretty slow at that resolution so I had to export every frame and use the movie maker. It can be run at real time in lower resolution. Might be a problem with the code as well, as I'm not a very experienced programmer.

The gist of it is very simple. There may be better ways (way way better) to achieve this. A

1. I load a video. Every frame, I go through every pixel, skipping x,y amount (whatever looked good, I think in this case it was every 4 pixels). I store the x,y coordinates as I go through each frame into a list. I also store the brightness of every pixel. I use a PVector object to do so PVector(x,y,brightness). In other words (in python):

   def fetchPixels(): pixelcollection = []

   for x in range(0,tSource.width,skip):
      for y in range(0,tSource.height,skip):
          loc = x + y * tSource.width 
          if brightness(tSource.pixels[loc]) < minBright or tSource.pixels[loc] > maxBright:
              pixelcollection.append(PVector(x,y,map(brightness(tSource.pixels[loc]),minBright,maxBright, minDepth,maxDepth)))
   
   return pixelcollection 
   

2. I create a grid of boxes and place into the canvas. I use the information I stored in pixelcollection to set the x,y,z values, where minBright and maxBright are thresholds regarding the brightness I actually am interested in . So say I stores the information for every pixel that has more than 100 in brigthness, and less than 255 (max, anyway) I map it to some depth, (minDepth, maxDepth). I played around with these values until I got a result that was interesting to me. In other words, the brightness value is used to map the z axis of every box.

3. I clean pixelcollection after eachframe, and refresh the output. I also used a blending mode which allowed for the small trails that are left after every frame. I scale the output to the desired size. I export every frame and then compile them using the built in processing movie maker. I then went into premiere and put in the music and sound.

Hope it's clear enough :)