Im fascinated by the progress of various affordable solutions in this field. Fully automated solutions wont give results as polished a result as that film, but I believe its possible for videobloggers to use these sorts of creative effects in a cheap/free and quick way.
On both the PC and the Mac, it is progress in the field of 3D Graphics card hardware which holds most promise. In recent years, features have been added to 3D graphics cards that enable all sorts of special effect to be handled quickly and at high resolution by the 3D card. These effects may not look like they are anything to do with 3D of any kind, but they still use the 3D cards power to give impressive results. It is taking quite a long time for this stuff to get to a useable level, and for peoples computers to have enough power. But its getting there. I see VJing software on the PC and Mac start to use this stuff. Part of the plan for my (stalled) videoblog is to show videos of this stuff in action, because a lot of it isnt very well known or immediately useable/obvious to all people from non-VJing backgrounds. A major problem with most solutions is that unlike editing software, they arent often designed to handle audio, because VJs often use silent clips. Anyway if you have a Mac with Tiger then there is a free solution of sorts, or at least half a solution. Quartz Composer is a free Tiger developer tool that enables you to harness various core image and video things and do things like create screensavers, and apply special effects to video in realtime. Heres some examples that someone has created, examples such as ComicBook3 and Watercolour provide results that are not a million miles away from that film, though obviously not the same. http://www.samkass.com/blog/ These are the sorts of effects I was using ages ago in the flashmeeting videoconference to distort myself in realtime. Anyway they are not complete solutions, but show the potential. On the PC the same sort of technology can be accessed through DirectX shader stuff, but I dont have any decent free examples, I use a few commercial VJ softwares to access this stuff, but its still in its infancy until more people share shader code for different effects. Steve of Elbows --- In [email protected], "Bill Streeter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Yeah this is the second film that Richard Linklater has done like > this. The first was Waking Life in 2001. It's a pretty incredible > technique. You can shoot really low budget because the rotoscoping is > really what you see on screen. I know that the way Waking Life was > done is with a custom solution developed by an Austin TX company > called Flat Black Films and it's based on Quicktime. There were > promises of making a commercial version of the App but I dunno what > happened to that plan, because as far as I know it never happened. > Even so even with this software the process is very labor intenisive. > Each frame is digitally hand drawn. The closest thing I could come up > with was importing movies into Flash and then using the (inadiquate) > flash vector tools to trace each frame. This was the most effecent way > I could come up with and it wasn't pretty. There are ways of getting > an animated looking effect that are much less labor intensive either > using photoshop actions and quicktime or right within Final Cut Pro. > But none of them really look as good as the look you're going for. > > Bill Streeter > LO-FI SAINT LOUIS > www.lofistl.com > > --- In [email protected], Steve Garfield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > > > > Hi Rich, > > You sure are making me do a lot of Google searches this morning. > > > > That movie looks really cool: > > > > <http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/ascannerdarkly.html> > > > > On Oct 8, 2005, at 11:18 AM, Rich Hand wrote: > > > > > Okay, so now I sound like a complete dweeb. The thing I am trying to > > > do is make my digital video look like the "animated" like version > > > similar to the recent Keanu Reeves film "A Scanner Darkly". > > > > --Steve > > -- > > Home Page - http://stevegarfield.com > > Video Blog - http://stevegarfield.blogs.com > > Text Blog - http://offonatangent.blogspot.com > > > > Like Paul Revere, leading the citizen's media revolution. > > > ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Get Bzzzy! (real tools to help you find a job). Welcome to the Sweet Life. http://us.click.yahoo.com/A77XvD/vlQLAA/TtwFAA/lBLqlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
