gif support

"Where is Feature X? I need Feature X! How can you not have Feature X?"
carmatic
Met Resolume in a bar the other day
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Re: gif support: CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!

Post by carmatic »

MkUltra wrote:Ask and you shall receive!

I built an ImageParticles Plugin, you can play ANY GIF in rez, with support for transparency and animation. Use a GIF as a standalone loop, or use the particles feature to layer a cloud of GIFs (or PNGs) in your VJ sets! It supports up to 75 individual animated GIFS at a time... which is a lot...

Let me know what you think-- and pics would be awesome!
I have registered on this forum just to post this message

for $25 you get one 'gif player' plugin where the gif you open will be resized to a very small size and be off-center, so you have to reposition the image when you resize it....
you also get 4 plugins which give the same particle effect which only simulates snow falling , where the only options are to alter the horizontal movement, the particle size, and particle intensity; the particles always fall downwards and there are no other options... two of the particle effect plugins seem to be identical and you cannot change the input image, and you get one particle plugin which opens PNG images and another particle plugin which opens GIFs

opening a large GIF would cause Resolume Arena to grind to a halt and the user interface becomes unresponsive, and opening the wrong GIF will give you an optional error message in the output... the 75 frame limit is very restrictive when compared to some of the newer motion art GIF's out there
there is no way to alter the playback speed of the GIFs (better to just convert them to MOVs using free utilities), clicking on the playback control buttons for the GIFs will cause Resolume Arena to freeze up until you select another clip, if it has not crashed completely

the user interface involves copying and pasting the filenames of your image files into a text field inside the parameters within Resolume Arena

the only advantage that I can see for this plugin is the transparency effect for GIF's , but its less effort and more flexible to just use generative effects if you want transparency effects

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MkUltra
Is taking Resolume on a second date
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Re: gif support

Post by MkUltra »

Hey Carmatic, thanks for the input! The points about direction of particle movement are well taken, of course it would be useful to have full control of movement on the vertical as well as horizontal axis. I'll make sure that ends up in the next patch.

Adjusting speed is something that's been on my radar, but I haven't had a chance to implement it. Usually if I want to change the speed I'll just record the plugin in Resolume and then adjust the playback from there, but I could see how it would be nice to have more granular control.

I'll try to address some of your other comments.

Sounds like you've been using an older version since although the initial release had the gif spawn at the upper left, subsequent patches (which I send out for free to customers) have addressed this and updated the canvas size to 1080p.

I guess it might be helpful to have everything scale to fit, but of course when users want to have a cloud of sprites then that would not be desirable behavior. Maybe a "resize to fit" button would be useful here, since forcing an unexpected resize can also be a problem. In general, resizing unknown art assets is a non-trivial issue to address, since it has to account for gifs that can be anywhere from 10x10 to >1080px wide (not recommended, btw).

It's always better to let the user set their options themselves where possible.

You're correct that loading in "motion art" gifs can cause Resolume to slow down-- the process of breaking apart the gif and rendering it to individual sprite frames is a real load on the processor. As you can see in the demo video, this plugin is designed with the idea of integrating gif sprites with your set, not necessarily to function as a high-rez gif video mixer. Although that would be a cool project to take on...

This is why I specifically stated that large file sizes could result in poor performance in both the FAQ on the website, and in the README files with the plugin. I realize that no one reads FAQ or READMEs, however, and I should make the limitations more clear in the documentation.

I'm not sure how you managed to end up with a loop pack that has 4 identical plugins, if you PM me your email and purchase ID I'll be happy to send you an updated pack.

carmatic
Met Resolume in a bar the other day
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Re: gif support

Post by carmatic »

Thank you for your reply
in regards to the pack, I received 4 particle effects in the zip file: basic particles (no option to change image) , snowflakes (no option to change image) , imageparticles, and gif particles
for me, my expectation when I bought the plugin was being able to loop gif's in sync to the music
yes, I have read the readme file, and I was severely dissapointed to discover from it that I have to manually type the filenames into a text field
Also, attempting to use the playback controls seems to cause the plugin to 'rebuild' the gif that it has loaded, hence the non-responsiveness ... it seems that Flash support is not a priority for Resolume, there is no GPU acceleration nor multi-core support, so the situation seems dire in that regard

The other issues I have discussed are relatively minor for me

I received the purchase confirmation email with the link inside it on 13th february, 11:02 am GMT, I am unable to send you a private message because this is only my 2nd post
Last edited by carmatic on Wed Feb 17, 2016 19:36, edited 1 time in total.

Simon111
Met Resolume in a bar the other day
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Re: gif support

Post by Simon111 »

Image

carmatic
Met Resolume in a bar the other day
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Joined: Tue Feb 16, 2016 01:20

Re: gif support

Post by carmatic »

I have a question, what is wrong with allowing the GIF's to be displayed at their original size, without any resizing or lengthy processing? it is certainly not a limitation of Flash, as 'theturtle32' library proves

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MkUltra
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Re: gif support

Post by MkUltra »

Original size is the way to go-- typically a GIF will be less than 1080p, so original size + auto center is desirable default behavior. If you're running at HD it centers and renders nicely, which is why I have the plugin auto position but not auto-scale.

Performance with large scale gifs is another issue. Gifs basically need to be re-rendered in order to work with Resolume (Flash extracts a frame, converts to bitmap, draws to stage, caches the next, etc) so I've found some slowdowns with gifs that have high per-pixel transforms. And Flash is a total memory hog to begin with!

I'll check out this library, might be worth taking a look at!

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MkUltra
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Re: gif support

Post by MkUltra »

Hey Carmatic,
I'm sending out an update link in the next days for a free download, it should include a package with five plugins (as specified in the product page in the website): GIF PLAYER (plays a single gif, centered in the screen), GIF PARTICLES (renders a particle cloud of gifs), IMAGE PARTICLES (renders a particle cloud of JPGs or PNGs), BASIC PARTICLES, and SNOW PARTICLES.

Still not sure why your package only had four plugins in it, I'm still trying to figure that out.

As you've noticed, Flash support is starting to be phased out in Resolume, it's been quite a challenge to keep up with changing featuresets. It's why I'm experimenting more with Processing in Resolume.

The playback control, and drag and drop image loading are totally features that would be awesome to put in, but unfortunately the way Resolume communicates with Flash (and the way Flash animates movieclips and sprites at runtime) it's not possible.

This is why I have a featureset demo video of the plugin on the product page and FAQ, so people can be informed of what features are available before purchase. I'm sorry it was not more clear.

One trick I use when I want to framesynch is to run the gif in the plugin, and record in Rez for a couple seconds. This gives me a nice video file with transparency and full Resolume playback control, it's also a great technique to convert a lot of gifs quickly.

However, your comments about finer control of the particle swarm movement were really helpful and I've added additional movement controls in the new download. I also fixed a bug with centering/sizing on the GIF PLAYER plugin that (as you noticed) can result in off-center and poorly sized image spawning.

Look for a promo code in your mailbox soon!
carmatic wrote:Thank you for your reply
in regards to the pack, I received 4 particle effects in the zip file: basic particles (no option to change image) , snowflakes (no option to change image) , imageparticles, and gif particles
for me, my expectation when I bought the plugin was being able to loop gif's in sync to the music
yes, I have read the readme file, and I was severely dissapointed to discover from it that I have to manually type the filenames into a text field
Also, attempting to use the playback controls seems to cause the plugin to 'rebuild' the gif that it has loaded, hence the non-responsiveness ... it seems that Flash support is not a priority for Resolume, there is no GPU acceleration nor multi-core support, so the situation seems dire in that regard

The other issues I have discussed are relatively minor for me

I received the purchase confirmation email with the link inside it on 13th february, 11:02 am GMT, I am unable to send you a private message because this is only my 2nd post

carmatic
Met Resolume in a bar the other day
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Feb 16, 2016 01:20

Re: gif support

Post by carmatic »

Hello, I have received your updated files and the GIFs opening centered in the player is much appreciated

A shame that it is not feasible to sync the GIF's to the BPM, perhaps there is a better way for Arena to take advantage of the portability of GIF files

Joris
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Re: gif support

Post by Joris »

Well, in MKUltra's defense, GIF is probably the shittiest format to work with when it comes to anything aside from linear playback.

It's designed for web playback, so it uses its own timing mechanism and has several weird GOP encoding techniques that make it very hard to do stuff like retiming to BPM, shuttling and reverse playback.

Because we can't offer these things reliably, we've held off on native GIF support. Props to MKUltra for trying to tackle it, because it's a can of worms.

If you want all the advantages of using a proper video format, just bite the bullet, take a deep breath and spend an evening converting your GIFs to MOV files.

leadedge
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Re: gif support

Post by leadedge »

Hi everyone.

yes Joris is right about timing. There are all sorts of gotchas.

But I think this is possible in a plugin, not with GIF but with animated PNG. This gives advantages including transparency.

In theory you would disassemble the png using libraries that are available, transfer the pixel data for each frame into a texture and render it frame by frame.

Then you could have a "Speed" control that kept track of elapsed time and render at whatever interval you chose, so it would speed up or slow down using that control. Then you would have a plugin control you could attach to BPM or FFT.

The vertical sync issue would come into it because each frame would start every 16.7 msec with vsync on, so potentially the whole thing might speed out of control with vertical sync off. But there should be control over that if the time interval is calculated properly.

I have the ingredients to make such a thing if there is sufficient interest. You would need to convert animated gif to animated png but there are simple tools for this.

http://gif2apng.sourceforge.net/

So the question is whether there is any advantage over converting to a movie format, or any disadvantage in doing it.

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