Slitscan Artist

Wired magazine has a little article on an artist who carries a conventional desktop scanner around with him, including on city streets and underwater, to essentially create digital slit scan imagery. I wanted to point people at this article just to get across the fact that Studio Artist gives you the capability to create this same kind of imagery without having to lug a desktop scanner everywhere you go.

In some sense the artist in the article is using the most difficult and cumbersome means possible to get the artistic effects he is looking for. So he gets points for creating a grand spectacle i guess, but logistically and practically it would be extremely difficult to do what he is doing. But if you re-think the end results he is trying to achieve with the actual final artist imagery he is generating (slit scan imagery), then you can come up with various work scenarios using video recorders and Studio Artist processing that are much more practical, compact, low cost, and flexible.

The alternative approach is to work with Studio Artist's Temporal Slit Scan effects. There are several different ones we offer. The Temporal Scan Tracker is the most flexible one to work with for creating slit scan effects.

But we also offer Temporal Slit Scan Complete, and Temporal Time Axis Rotate Complete in V4. 

The workflow to re-create what the artist in the article is doing without having to lug a desktop scanner and associated computer system everywhere you go, is to just shoot digital video on location. There are all kinds of different ways to do this now days, including smart  phones, goPros, or more conventional video cameras. And all of those approaches are fairly compact and portable. And goPros can be rigged to be used underwater, as can other portable video devices (if underwater is where you want to go).

So you shoot video on location, with an eye for how you are going to be processing it using Studio Artist's various slit scan effects later. Then you convert the segments of video you have recorded that you want to work with into individual Quicktime movie files. You then can pick one of those movie files, load it into Studio Artist's source area, and then you can start working with one of the 3 different Temporal slit scan effects i mentioned above. So you use the Temporal processing effects in Studio Artist to process multiple frames of a movie file to create a single artistic image generated out of multiple movie frames.

Here are 3 examples of what i'm talking about.

All of these slit scan imagery experiments started with video footage shot with a small portable video device. They are of underwater imagery, but i didn't get wet shooting that video footage. The first 2 videos were taken inside of the Sydney aquarium looking through the glass into the aquarium. The last one was shot standing above a pond of fish looking down into the clear water at fish swimming below.

For these particular examples, i held the pocket sized video camera i was using still, and recorded a scene where fish were moving over time in the frame of view of the fixed camera.

I then edited segments of the video i shot that i thought was going to work well for slit scan effects. I then opened these movie files as source movies in Studio Artist. I then used the Temporal Scan Tracker effect to generate the slit scan images shown above. Each image is generated automatically from a series of movie frames in the current source movie.

So, you too can do everything the artist in the Wired magazine article is doing today, using Studio Artist and whatever portable video capture device you happen to own. You don't need to manually lug a bulky old time desktop scanner around with you in the physical world to do it.

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  • your slit scan imagery of local streets was one of the main reasons I bought v4. I still have not executed the projects that I had in mind for it. Thanks for the reminder.

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