Movie Mapping Movies

[Synthetik Software]

Someone asked a question recently about art mapping a movie with a folder of sub movies using MSG Evolver recently. And as i was thinking it occurred to me that you could do something similar in Studio Artist directly. The trick is to use 2D index mapping in a movie source brush or movie background texture.

Let's say you have 5 different sub movies you want to work with, and they are all 50 frames long. The you could make a movie brush were they are strung back to back. The movie brush would be 250 frames, the first 50 frames being the first sub movie, the second 50 frames being the second sub movie, etc. The you can set up the 2D index mapping for the movie so that the individual sub movies frame advance and you use some visual attribute to index between them. I ran some simple tests using source luminance to map the movies and it does work. I used time particles for continuity through time for the paint nibs. But you could use a fixed sampling grid for the path starts.

[Synthetik Software]

Sequential.

[Synthetik Software]

Here's a stupid example using a few time particles to show it does work.

[Thorrific]

Hey I like that! Cool!

[Synthetik Software]

Here's 2 simple preset examples. The first uses a movie source brush. The second uses a movie background texture.

Note that if you use a movie source brush, if you want a non rectangular shape you will need to build your movie with an embedded alpha channel for the shape mask and use the Source Alpha Brush Brush Type. Using the movie background texture lets you use a normal computational (or other) source brush, so you can specify the shape there. Depending on your movie size you my need to adjust the horz and vert offset for the background texture accordingly. And of course size the source brush to something that makes sense. The background texture will tile if the source brush is too large.

My test movie file used 3 sub movies, so you'd need to change the A dimension for the 2D movie index accordingly if you use more sub movies.

[Synthetik Software]

Someone recently asked me how to emulate the old MSG Evolver feature where you map a database of movies onto a movie to make a video mosaic. The trick is to use 2D index mapping for the movie brush. This old forum post discusses how to do it.

[Thorrific]

Thanks John, I had forgotten about this thread and/or couldn't find it!

[Thorrific]

It works great!

[Chris Northcross]

Very cool. Any chance of this being made into a tips page?

[Synthetik Software]

Good point, it probably should be documented in a tip since it's hard to find here. I'll try to do that in the next few days.

[ASARE CHRISTIAN]

Hi John ,

Please can this same 2d index mapping be used to emulate the art mapper effect using the source image. 

Thanks

[Synthetik Software]

Not at the moment. There's no concept of splitting the 2 axis modulations to allow for more than 1 color vector for the rgb mapping of an image brush. I'll think about that for the future.

[ASARE CHRISTIAN]

Hi John, 

Please thanks for the response. But I have seen the art mapper effect simulated in the works of some users on the forum.