random playback and/or manipulation of video

[Donna Kuhn]

is there a way to play with the timing of video playback or some algorithmic approach to altering or manipulating the movie. something like the data shatter movie brushes but for the whole movie. it seems you can do this manually with a loaded canvas movie but is there a way to do it with less control...i see there is a way to randomly reorder bezier keyframes but i'm only starting with those. thanks...

[Synthetik]

You could configure the paint synthesizer to do it.

You could build a paint preset using region fill as brush pen mode in the paint synthesizer that is based on a movie brush using random frame indexing. Then you could goto the region as brush mode control panel in the paint synthesizer and set the generator to be full screen rectangle. You would also want a max path length in path shape control panel to be 1, since you only want this large full screen brush nib to draw once for a path.

version 4 has some other approaches to doing this, but in 3.5 i think this might be the best approach. many people are not aware of the fact that they can configure the paint synth to be a general purpose image or movie processing module by using the 'full screen rectangle' generator option in region fill as brush pen mode.

[Donna Kuhn]

what is random frame indexing and where do i find it?!

[Synthetik]

If you got to the brush source control panel in the paint synthesizer and switch the brush type to movie brush (or open a preset that already uses a movie brush), you will see there is a frame mod parameter, which determines how the movie brush indexes through its frames. There's a random option in there.

If you are using a movie background texture, there is a similar frame modulation parameter.

[Donna Kuhn]

it worked! i had no idea the paint synthesizer could do something like that. plus there's so many other options to add to it, instant split screen effects etc. btw i saw the movie Juno yesterday and the opening credits had an interesting cartoony pencil effect. i will have to study the paint synthesizer more. i usually just think it paints, not for manipulating video. thanks....