Magazine covers?

[holly]

Downloaded a hundred campy boy muscle magazine covers from the '50s-60s. They make an amusing screensaver, but any ideas on how to animate this kind of still imagery for VJing? I think the titles and coverstories are funny so I'm not going to cut the boys out of the page.... I've downloaded girly mags too, but never found a great way to make them move.... Any suggestions?

I'm thinking about just using them as inspirations and faking a campy magazine cover with a real person (more my style), but I thought it might be a useful discussion? Any suggestions? I'm sure most VJs have something like this in their kit...

http://vintagemusclemags.com/magCovers/bmf/bmf035.jpg

[visualove]

Pan and scan

[DrEskaton]

i've got plans for a quartz composer patch that will do exactly this kind of thing with folders of images.

hope to have something in a few weeks and I'll put it up for download....

until then use iMovie with the ken burns effect maybe?

drempels on the pc is pretty good with folders of stills but I don't know any mac versions which is why I'm planning to make one....

edit, or if you want to make them "flex limbs" etc, cut them out in photoshop, make masks to split them into sections and do some animations in flash would be easiest I think....

[holly]

Yeah, Ken Burns I guess is as good as it gets. Kinda reverent tho. Been using the osX screensaver but it is so slow. Funny sometimes where it decides to randomly zoom-in.... I thought about just recording the screensaver and then speeding it up in AE, etc.

My friend feedBuck just opens pics in the QT player and hits play so they cycle as fast as possible. It's actually a cool effect. This would be great for sequestial titles where the magazine header stays in one place (sorta) and the boys/girls keep changing.

:idea: Would be nice if you could combine the two and pan/scan over fast sequential covers. Can you figure that one out for your Quartz Composer thing DrEsk? I guess it would load a folder of images as a mov first, and then do the pans and zooms on the movie? Hmmm. This would be worth trying in iMovie, but I hate iMovie because I never figured out where all the files go. I'm convinced it is hiding them in my osX folder somewhere....

As for cutting out the limbs and keyframing movement... bleh. It would be easier to hire a hooker and shoot him in front of the bluescreen.:D

[kevenius]

Those covers are really nice!
Thanks for the link!

Maybe something like this (http://www.eyesupply.tv/kevin/) is an idea?

[holly]

Originally posted by kevenius
Those covers are really nice!
Thanks for the link!

Maybe something like this (http://www.eyesupply.tv/kevin/) is an idea?

:scared: oops. Is that sarcasm? Here (http://vintagemusclemags.com/cgi-bin/mags) are the muscleboys. Anyone got links to girly mags?

Waah, I don't have that AVI codec (I guess). Can you transcode to QT?

[kevenius]

I will transcode it.

No sarcasm :D

Got the link out of the picture link ;)

[kevenius]

Here's the QT (http://www.eyesupply.tv/kevin/)

[DrEskaton]

Originally posted by holly

:idea: Would be nice if you could combine the two and pan/scan over fast sequential covers. Can you figure that one out for your Quartz Composer thing DrEsk? I guess it would load a folder of images as a mov first, and then do the pans and zooms on the movie?

flashing up a cover at a time with beat sync and a nice fade, pan and scan and rapid flashing are all possible and all planned for my stills patch.

with qtz I can flash up the covers without having to make them a movie, nice with hires images....

[holly]

Originally posted by kevenius
Here's the QT (http://www.eyesupply.tv/kevin/)
WOW! That looks sweet! All I would need are to comp up some flying blue squares with a white stroke, key several layers live.... Oh wait, Entrancer has a flying squares effect. Hmmm. I'll make a blue/black key and luma/chroma 2 or more layers....

Excellent! This gives me so many ideas! Thanks!:love:

Esk, can't wait for QT7!

[Bartholomew]

looks like these freeframe plugins are made to animate this kinda stuf:

http://www.vjforums.com/showthread.php?threadid=12220

[kevenius]

Glad I could help you.

[mondo]

chuck the jpegs into teh edirol cg8 and watch the output got nuts!!

[vjMediUm]

hey holly
about fast morfing between frames
could look good.

[vjMediUm]

check this out (http://www.samuelsdesign.com/comics/agoodgirl_romance.html)

[holly]

Originally posted by vjMediUm
check this out (http://www.samuelsdesign.com/comics/agoodgirl_romance.html) *gasp* those are WONderFUL! Hahahaha!:love2:

I found this one yesterday. The scans are small but clean: sci-fi mag covers (http://www.rainfall.com/posters/scifimag/catalog1.htm)

Morphing would be cool. D'you know a cheap or free morpher? Doesn't it take forever to render?

[DrEskaton]

http://www.norrkross.com/ makes a free morphx software.

dont know if it will be that good for magazine covers.

are you after something to use live or something to prepare content in advance holly?

i'm assuming you want to prepare it in advance cause you don't take computers to gigs do you?

[vjMediUm]

for pc dunno!
mac user

[vjMediUm]

enjoy, more stuff (http://dragonberry.com/links/pages/Comic_Book_Images/)

[DrEskaton]

also if you don't already know about it Quickmovie very quickly makes a quicktime from a folder full of images. It will resize them all for you and display them at any framerate you want. really handy for quicm flashframe stuff.

http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Video/QuickMovie.shtml

[holly]

I could never fit all my dvd footage onto a harddrive without losing quality. What I see people doing "live" that works on computers is clip triggering, and that's usually just a few seconds per clip.... I haven't ever been impressed with jitter fx or 8-bit feedback.... Guess I'm just oldskool. The wooo of it being "live" doesn't hold if the quality sucks or the video stutters.... Even the live 3D I've seen is pretty thin and stickfigure-ish, but that's what interests me most about software, the potential of game engines that can handle video textures.... until then I'd settle for a ParticleIllusion (http://www.wondertouch.com/default.asp) VJ app....

But to answer your question Esk, it would be about 50/50. Wanted to get some new ideas on how to show this kind of footage and make it seem as alive (as opposed to just "live") as possible. Also a topic for discussion in this forum....;)

Thanks for Quickmovie; saves a step!:D

Ohhh, these are greeeaaat! Thanks for the links guys!
http://costa.lunarpages.com/ec/wsfa1952.jpg

[vjMediUm]

morphing (http://www.morpheussoftware.net/)
give morph a try, if you get similar covers aligned
u'll get some very cool.

[Stuart]

I haven't ever been impressed with jitter fx or 8-bit feedback
I'm pretty newskoool and I very much agree

Now, if it were me dicing up those covers I'd seperate out all of the text into different layers, add some text layers of my own in dialogue bubbles, and float, shadow and offset the text over the images. I'd use the heavier type and bubbles to track matte one image over another. Basically creating a dimensional moving comic book.

[vjMediUm]

was thinking about that to
not a bad idea

[vjMediUm]

yo holly
check out spaceman's avatar (http://www.vjforums.com/showthread.php?threadid=12537/ u could do the same with the covers heroes.

[KROMA]

Put them all in a folder numbered in sequence. Import them to After Effects and render some quicktimes of them at 30 FPS (if you've got many of them).
playing these with an audio reactive software such as VDMXX will trigger one frame at a time in sync with the audio. Looks cool. I did something similar recently with some doodles from my diary.

(I just checked the Quickmovie app...great news, will save me some work. Thanks Dr. Eskaton)

The other way to go is to separate the elements in layers in photoshop and animate them in various ways using AE...then trigger using your favorite audiovisualizer (I recommend again VDMXX or Modul8)


Arturo Gil
XNOGRAFIKZ

RECORD>>SPLINTER>>SCRAMBLE

[videobrian]

this would be one approach which i have been known to favour:

http://www.mediumrecords.com/video/smoke2.mov

23MB 6min (sorry, not progressive download)
sort of needs speakers with bass

[videobrian]

there's this program:


http://www.grantedsw.com/still-life/

[Stuart]

heh

http://www.bpninc.com/evideo/video_mac_hi.mov

[videobrian]

2 x heh