Swanky Retro-Future Diamond Heist

Here's a preview for a neat green-screen based action flic. All the effects were done in After Effects. Could we do better?

Via Boing Boing

Extracting Images From Movies

We now have access (or soon will) to nice (as in clean) moving pictures thanks to our Panasonic AVCHD camera. Now, we need to hack those images! What we want is a simple utility to extract the frames from our .MTS files. It is important to realize that the .MTS file is really just an MPEG4, therefore if you are having problems loading it, you might just try a new file extension. After reviewing several tools I have found one that works just as we need, FFMPEG. It is a cross platform, command line tool that can convert nearly any movie format to any other, including a simple frame dump (what we want). Much thanks to Jeffery Bowles (an Advanced Graphics 413 superstar) for a nice, short description of getting it going on a mac:

MTS files are just mpeg4 files. The command line utility ffmpeg will let you extract the frames:

Building:

svn checkout svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
cd ffmpeg
./configure
make && make install

Example usage with an HD camera

ffmpeg -i 00000.MTS -s hd1080 -f image2 waa-%03d.png


Note: the %03d bit above means each successive frame should be numbered using 3 digits. That is, the first frame will be waa-001.png the next will be waa-002.png and so on, up to our last frame waa-999.png.

First Movie

The Library of Congress has begun placing important historical footage on YouTube. Above is the VERY FIRST moving picture, of a man sneezing. Created by Edison Labs in 1893, it used a device called the Kinetograph. This research cost only $13,000 in today's dollars.

Via Wired

Aiptex Camera Test Shot

-- 400x246 reference image of DSC checker from their website.

-- Testing the Aiptex mini-hd camera. My office, 3pm south and eastern light. 720p-30fps.


You can click on the images to see them full size. Overall, it isn't clear that the Aiptex HD really provides much advantage over SD. This is a case of you get what you pay for. The reference image (top) is effectively SD resolution, whereas the Aiptex shot is 720p, which one has better image quality? How do you rate image quality? What are the factors you are using to judge?

Tilt Shift Photography

Bathtub IV from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.
Tilt Shift Photography is a technique for capturing extreme depth of field (among other important effects) in the real world. Notice how everything in the video seems like a miniature model. Why?

Average Faces

In class, we talked about how you can emphasize the uniqueness of a face by accentuating it's deviation from some canonical average face. Face Research has a nice demo that allows you to create your own average, for example: The average male/female, white/black etc. Also note that there is an explanation of the process that they use to create the average faces linked to the page, it's worth a read. Think about why these average faces are pleasing or interesting...

High Dynamic Range Images (HDRI)

High Dynamic Range Images allow us to capture a virtually unlimited range of light intensities (from very dark to very bright) in a single image. This requires more than 8 bits of precision for each color channel, typically 16-32 bits per channel. We can create HDR images of real life by taking multiple images with different exposures and combining them. This can be done in Photoshop using File-Automate-Merge to HDR. Give it a try! Since we can't actually display HDR images on a computer monitor, we have to "tone map" it so that the aspects of the image that we are interested in are visible. HDR images are essential for realistic computer generated images mixed with live action. In the near future, HDR photography will be common place.