Not all days are equal: Video and installation

Part of the work into calendar representation and how it may reflect and shape our awareness and perception of time has been nonverbal investigation using lens based media.

Representative from this work are the walk tests taken in Hong Kong in January 2015

Not all days are equal from Daniel Buzzo on Vimeo.

This early edit gets close to a suggestion of what I had in mind.

After some work in the studio using processing to control the video live and alter sequencing several tests emerged that get close to the intended effect.

These are screen grabs of live processed video.

from a short piece on an escalator

escalator frames test from Daniel Buzzo on Vimeo.

These longer pieces from the central tram illustrate a little better what was intended;

tram-frames test from Daniel Buzzo on Vimeo.

Durations-tram-test from Daniel Buzzo on Vimeo.

The core code in Processing is minor and relies heavily on the processing.video library

and is a set of variation on this simple piece.

import processing.video.*;
Movie myMovie;
long lastTime = 0;
void setup() {
size(1280, 720);
frameRate(30);
myMovie = new Movie(this, "escalator2-anim.mov");
myMovie.loop();
lastTime = millis();

}

void draw() {
if (myMovie.available()) {
myMovie.read();
}
image(myMovie, 0, 0);
if ( millis() > lastTime ) {
image(myMovie, 0, 0);
myMovie.jump(random(myMovie.duration()));
myMovie.speed(random(-10.0, 10.0));
myMovie.speed(random(10.0));

float myWait = random(50, 1000);
lastTime = millis() + int(myWait) ;
}
}

The frame unpacking appears fairly efficient and the video codec appears to be the largest bottleneck in the process. Using full frame compression techniques without keyframes is essential to high performance and smooth results. These tests are encode using the Apple animation codec. This inflates files sizes by a factor of 100 or more (the original Tram sequence file being 18.6Mb as an H264 mp4 file inflating to 1.9Gb as an Animation Codec compressed file at the same resolution. I am certain this can be optimised greatly – later on….