Creating Video Software
Creating Video Software
- Subject: Creating Video Software
- From: email@hidden
- Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 01:31:26 -0400
I'm about to start development on a new special effects program. It's
a very basic program that basically takes images with alpha channels
and composites them over a video fame. So, it might take a picture of
a lightsaber and composite it on a video frame using alpha channels in
the lightsaber image. The user will need to be able to drag the image
around on the screen, resize it, etc. The software will create the
effects on a frame by frame basis.
I'm not sure how to approach creating this software. I've looked into a
couple different options:
1) Video frame to NSImage using Quicktime API: One way to create the
program would be to convert every frame of the video to an NSImage when
the movie was loaded. Then, I could just use NSComposite to composite
the effects image over the frame. To handle scrolling through the
frames, the software could just update the NSImageView with the correct
image for the frame selected. When the user is ready to export it just
creates a movie file by combining all the different NSImages using the
quicktime API. This route seems to take a lot of overhead in terms of
memory, especially if its a large movie.
2) Use quicktime API: I haven't looked into using the quicktime API
that extensively yet. I suppose there are functions that would let me
composite the image over a video frame without first converting the
video frame to an NSImage. I'm not sure how I would display this on
the screen through, especially since the user needs to be able to drag
the image around over the video frame.
3) OpenGL: I'm not sure if this would even work, but what about openGL?
Perhaps I could use some openGL functions to composite the images over
the video? That might even allow me to composite 3D objects over the
video frame?
4) QuickDraw: Maybe I could use the older carbon QuickDraw functions to
do the compositing. QuickDraw seems rather old...
Well, no matter which route I chose, I still need some way of keeping
track of the location of every image on ever frame. I suppose I could
just create a NSMutableDictionary with the position of each corner of
the image for each frame?
Any suggestions on which route to take and how to keep track of the
image coordinates would be VERY helpful. Thanks!
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