Friday, June 14, 2013

Trees



Sound for the above from OBS:



I've been playing with filtered video in Quartz Composer. What I'm eventually aiming at is some kind of image accumulation; I'd like whatever's in motion to add to the image and whatever's static to stay. A big problem there is that video is inherently noisy, so if your method of accumulation is registering change, everything in every frame is changing pretty much all the time. The scary trees above are not entirely the product of psychedelic mushrooms, but instead are oak trees in the yard with two layers of edge-detection combined, one produces black edges and one produces coloured edges, the theory being that images might be best accumulated with edge detection because the rest of the image is undisturbed; a little jitter and a spot of colour remains, outlined in black. And indeed there are a few dead spots. Unfortunately the colours are like a plastic robot vomiting tinker toys, but it's a step.

Hmm, maybe there could be histogram comparisons between images and a drastic enough change produces an addition...

Play in Quartz Composer is probably something of a dead end now that Apple's new developer tools are out and there's not really any mention of it. Other things are out there that produce varying levels of satisfaction along these lines, but they're just not as easy/developed yet. I'm hoping that Field gets a little more usable for me.

6 comments:

OBS said...

Neat!

Also: soundtrack.

Mooser said...

Try it on a simpler image than the very complex one of leaves on trees. One not quite so filled with edges and different color densities. But don't say I suggested it.

OBS said...

You'd think Mooser would be able to provide a nice, stable video of some sort of grazing creature, sedately munching away in a serene grassland...

Maybe a zebra. Or elk. Something like that.

Substance McGravitas said...

A lot of my testing happens on the bus, so usually I get an image of my face and some clean lines around a window. But nobody wants to see that kind of thing.

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

Did Rush ever come out against the socialist Candian content laws, or did they consider socialism okay when it benefited them?

Substance McGravitas said...

They've benefited from the CBC an awful lot through the years. I'd be surprised if they really thought about how their lyrics apply to their business.