Ellard

Actually my students have a big one that I’m working on. Don’t think too hard about that – think of this: you are making an animation that pulls back from a single image to reveal it is the middle of a larger mosaic of images, 39 by 39 in fact. The screen is 768 pixels tall. So your 768 pixel image will need to be part of something 44,928 by 29,952 pixels in size. That’s like ten Hollywood movies across. And things get interesting at that size.

All the standard image formats die – JPEG, BMP, PSD – forget it. Photoshop starts to use ‘Large Document Format’ or PSB – not understood by other tools. After Effects and Nuke just cry and give up. Most smaller software turns into radioactive dust. TIFF will hold the fort so long as the file is less than 4Gb in size. Yet another reason to congratulate SONY – their Vegas software will load a TIFF that size and even animate it – impressive! But in this case we couldn’t use Vegas because we need a certain motion path.

I generated the mosaic first at quarter size – ‘only’ 22.5K across. After Effects can handle up to 30K. Then I generate the full size image and pass it to command line software called ImageMagick which opens the file line by line and so can deal with the enormous memory strain. This is familiar from the days when Amiga computers would use similar buffering to work on print images in 4Mb of RAM (Art Department Pro was the name I seem to recall).

This can slice the image into 9 tiles of which we only need the middle. The trick is to track out from this middle section until it’s about to leave gaps at the edge of the screen. Then switch over to the lower resolution version which is by this stage indistinguishable.

Slightly tedious work-flow but doable. Has to be done 12 times, so it had better be.

Possible alternative route is to load a TIFF into Photoshop and then write an action to slice the image into percentages. By the time I got through reading the ImageMagick manual I felt that I’d paid my dues and I’ll stick to that script.

It’s interesting to think of how larger images might get with the demand for higher resolution, multiple screens and 3D. The Science Fiction staple ‘holodeck’ would probably require images of this kind. Although probably something made out of vectors, given current work.

THE END of THE BLU RAY IS NIGH

The Blu Ray of ShowbagHD is definitely ready to be sent out for people to try – the plan is to buy in bulk at about 5 dollars a disc and then charge about $12 (the same as a CD) which should cover the roughly $6 postage. I don’t expect to make any profit on this – I’d rather lots of people have it and there’s also a fair bit of sampled visuals on there which seem a bit bad to charge for.

I’ve learned enough from this to start on the album that was once going to be called Co Kla Coma 96 – at least until Kevin Elliot decided to send a cease and desist letter over the CKC name. All of that seems to be worked out now and for the moment it’s going to be a Blu Ray called EXCALIBUR (and no I don’t know why – it’s something from Scientology that Lou Ball came up with. Although it also has to do with Mr Ed, the talking horse which Lou reckons is a ‘psychic point of resonance’. These people have mental problems.)