Later that night…
I also managed to get the first version of hell in a handcar running. Just a simple applet, which plays a series of frames from the let’s go to birmingham video, and where the framerate is controlled by the position of the mouse. The higher the mouse position the faster you go.
Don’t know whether this will be able to handle the framerates that I need, so any suggestions as to alternative environments for manipulating and rendering video loaded from files, would be welcome. Processing seems to handle video loaded from cameras much better - the link to the Quicktime library is a bit flakey.
Ideas arising:
- Like the idea of using the webcam to control it - in other words, need two people to act out the handcart movement in order to power it along - could detect height the two people. Saves on having any mechanism at all, and horrible insurance nightmares from having high inertia flywheel, scaffolding bars or any other public dangers
- If I do create some kind of physical mechanism - bicycles or hand pump, wonder if I can use an actual mouse connected to the rotating wheel to control it. Would be a lot easier than a BC-24 board or similar.
Processing does seem like a fairly accessible programming and deployment environment for rapid prototyping, or for those who want to just get down to creating interactive visuals which are fairly simple.
Comments
martinsan on 21 October 2005
Video playback performance is a complex mix of bit rate, coding technique, and other factors, so I’m assuming that the video camera output just suits the Pd environment. A little experimentation with transcoding the LGTB video should start to indicate how to get better performance.