I recently participated in a “game jam” – a competition where lots of people try to create a video game in a short period of time. The Ludum Dare Compo allows participants 48 hours to create a game from scratch (including all code, graphics, music, etc.) by themselves. I managed to create a little game called “Doom Hex: Escape”, and you can play it here: alexyoder.net/ludumdare27. It’s not entirely finished, and it can be pretty difficult, but it’s hopefully a little fun!
I’ve pretty much come to the couinlscon that there is no true way to get the true current frame of a video using any properties of the stream or metadata from the video. Whatever information you receive about the video you can never be sure that’s actually what pixels are being displayed. Even if you draw the video to a bitmap, you can never be sure what frame the video object is currently displaying when you copy the pixels. That is, the only way to know what frame is displayed is to actually look at that frame.The only true thing you can trust about a displayed frame is the frame itself. Therefore, the solution I came up with is to embed the frame value into the video itself. This can be done as a small bar at the bottom of the video that is the binary value of the current frame displayed as a barcode. Then, every frame you capture the video frame, check the pixels of the barcode, and convert the binary value back to base-10 and voile0, you have the actual current frame.Basically your video has an extra 10 pixels at the bottom. The first 5 pixels are the bottom 5 pixels of the video mirrored. This is to ensure that during the compression bleeding and artifacts don’t appear due to the stark contrast between the video and the barcode. The last 5 rows of pixels below the mirrored strip are the barcode. There are many options to make the barcode at the bottom of the video. Zeh wrote an After Effects expression that generates it as the video renders. I made mine externally, via Photoshop JSX. A better option than Photoshop scripting would have been processing or AIR app, but at the time I was too lazy to set either of those up and honestly I wanted to explore using JavaScript in Photoshop some more.Hi Zehwondering how i get my hands on the expression’ that will embed code as video is exported out of after effectstriciaPosted by on b7