I copied the download into a folder and renamed it dancer.mp4
In the terminal I move into the folder by typing cd and dragging the folder int the window and pressing return.
I then made a new folder mkdir jpg2
I switched to the finder and previewed the movie to find out where I want to start extracting frames, which turns out to be at 26 seconds, and I want to get 3 seconds worth at 6 frames per second:
You can see the gif ends up in the top folder. There is a 12/100 of a second delay, it loops forever, is reduced to 16 colors and optimised (O3).
Along the way there are a lot of other possibilities, convert for example can adjust the brightness and contrast (and a raft of other things). I brightened these ones up a bit:
Like the cartooning of videos a couple of posts ago there is the opportunity to see and understand a bit more about film using this technique. Jim might be thinking that (says Alan) but so far I am just having fun.
At that point I realise that the app helps you to manually trace frames, seemed a wee bit time consuming. I though I’d leave it for another day. I did start musing on doing something similar, I was thinging FFmpeg & ImageMagick.
To add the audio from the original to the out video to give me a final one.
the -shortest parameter gets rid of the audio at the end to make up for the frames I removed.
Bingo:
At this point I remembered iMovie has a comic filter…
This post is mostly as an aid to my occasional dip into the world of commandline video editing. Posting helps me remember. It also plays a wee bit fast and loose with copyright.
The featured image is a gif giffed from a few of the stills.
ps this is quite a disturbing clip, I didn’t really watch it till I finished, could have picked a nice one!
Update, Ron commented:
What would it look like if you’d run the result videos through the script one more time. Keeping the same number of jpegs but making the lines more stand out and the fills less so you’d have black outlines and white?
That didn’t make much difference os I did some tests with the parameters for cartoon, and Ron went with increasing the brightness: ../cartoon -b 300
@johnjohnston@jimgroom Brightness 300 looks strong. The big contrast adds to the effect. I'm often searching for using little as possible
As I had to get up early this morning I though I might make good use of my time. I popped into the Village shop and bought a screwdriver.
I wanted to have a closer look at the TV in my accommodation after last night’s blip.
I also need to get some more credits and decided on doing a wee bit of audio work. I am still trying to get an understanding of The Village by looking under the bonnet.
I had already taken a bit of audio from on of the surveillance tapes:
I ran it through the reverse filter in audacity:
Which was interesting and make some sort of sense if you are in a hypnagogia state. But it required further investigation. I found some instructions which lead to a new tool to add to my toolbox. PaulStretch is quite fascinating, and after spending quite some time testing the settings I fell back on the basic preset:
Feeding this into some video footage from the archives:
Tells us quite a lot about the state of Rover’s mind, or perhaps his master’s?
Some information
Movie clips extracted with MPEGStreamclip from video taken from dvd with HandBrake.
I am finding ffmpeg interesting as you can try different variations out quickly.
Rover normally seems to be a cold mechanical creature, this view suggests something deeper, organic perhaps, hints of ancient chants and secrets. Perhaps the Village is not as rational as we think.
Given I want to watch this on my commute I am afraid the first thing I did was rip a few episodes to m4v files. HandBrake: Open Source Video Transcoder works well, it prompted for another install to remove drm and I just followed through with that. I don’t feel that makes me a bad person.
After watching the first episode I was compelled to knock out a few quick gifs.
I used the usual method, open in MPEG Streamclip. Set in and out points. Press cmd-t. Export to image sequence. Open the first image in FireWorks (CS3). Drag the other files into the FW window. Open he Frames window. Select all the layers and choose distribute to frames from the frames window menu. Mess around. Export to MP3.
Taking Command
I’ve started exploring episode 1 from the terminal, relying and developing techniques that I’ve posted about here. I am getting quite interested in the fun that can be had through random and unexpected results and the ability to generate different files & views at a cracking rate. Instead of working hard to produce a single artifact this will allow me t oexplore the
A lot of this relies on various command line applications that I’ve installed over the years in a fairly messy way. I tend to try things that, if they go wrong, leave me googling like mad.
I am just going to note what I’ve played with so far and not give details of installing the software for now. Much can be installed on a mac via Homebrew.
ffmpeg -i the-prisoner-ep-1.m4v -r 1 -f image2 images/image-%4d.jpg
I now have 2938 jpgs to play with.
Recently I’ve been interested in averaging images so into the image folder, make an average folder and: ls *.jpg | xargs -n 10 sh -c 'convert "$0" "$@" -average average/"$0" '
Which gives me 294 files, each an average of 10 of the original jpgs.
I googled most of that code, the average command is part of ImageMagick.
To my mind these look rather lovely losing the clean 60’s lines of the original for something rather more dreamy and dark:
Duplicate the folder move, in the terminal into the new one and: sips --resampleWidth 240 *.jpg Gives some thumbnails: Averages which I’ll perhaps figure out what to do with later.
Next up I moved on to supercuts and gifboard, but I’ll leave the reporting of that to another post.
That didn’t make much difference os I did some tests with the parameters for cartoon, and Ron went with increasing the brightness:
../cartoon -b 300
This gave me this: