Hi all,
I’d like to display several videos at a time in the output of vvvv, like a grid. Imagine something like this (much less videos, 9 at most i think), but with videos instead of images:
What would be the way of doing so?
Not that I don’t like John Maeda’s work, but this is could be both easy or hard. If your machine can run 9 videos, you’s just hard-wire them and be done with it. Obviously, this depends on the size of the clips and the speed of your machine, but 9 movies at a time sounds like much to me. I’d suggest you try to experiment with a low-bandwidth, low-CPU codec like XVID or WMV9.
Or you store your clips as single image sequences in the RAM of your PC. There are descriptions for how to do this floating around on this forum.
Or you just combine them all into one single large movie, pre-render it, and pronto.
If you use really small videos, it shouldnt be to hard!
Hehehe, i posted maeda’s pic just because i didn’t have the time to do a sketch myself (i connect to the forum at work), but in fact it has nothing to do with this particular picture in style aside of the fact that i needed to express the idea of video grid.
The source videos will be scaled so that they are not too big (my idea is to scale them to the exact size i plan them to be in the screen, probably not much more than 160x100 each), so streaming from disk shouldn’t be that big of a problem…I hope.
What I don’t know (bear in mind that I’m a n00b) is how to place several videos onscreen, what nodes should I use, and how to combine their output…
As for the idea of “pre-rendering” the videos, could you elaborate on that idea? I’m open to suggestions…I thought about doing this on vvvv sinces its so flexible, and I could in fact do something interactive (not my main goal, but a possibility), but if there’s an easier way using premiere or after effects, I’m all ears.
(Please excuse my probably dumb questions, i come from the audio world, not from video…)
Thanks folks.
I’m a noob, too. But I would create 9 rectangles and apply a video-texture on each of them. Then grouping all together.
Would that work?
Yes, that should work, if your PC is up to it.
Like Cat said, if you use small optimized clips, it should be possible. Just try I say.
I thought simple make 1 big movie, and than use a spread to seak the part you want to display. But no mather what I try, I only get 1 videotexture, I think filestream isn’t spread-able.
@west. yes, the filestream is not spreadable. this is a well known vvvv annoyance. but even if you could do this in vvvv, your pc is likely to fail with more than just a couple of videos at the same time.
the more performant solution would be loading all material into ram, and just switch textures - you would definitely need to compromise on the length of the video.
but its quite possible to load something like 15000 128x128 8 bit palettized image frames into 1GB of RAM.