COMP3419, Multimedia Assignment opt-1

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I. initial planing
The original storyboard and plan as submitted in week 6 is
attached to the end of this document in its original state. as a
breif summary the original plan was to have the monkey in space,
the monkeys location tracked so its movement could be canceled, a
helmet overlay on the monkey and a hard-coded asteroid to hit the
monkey out of the sky. From the beginning the plan was to use a
1:2.40 aspect ratio or a resolution of 1920x800. this has
remained in the final version, as with the space theme.
II. changes in final version over initial plan
The Title was undecided in the initial plan but was going to be
transitioned with a wipe timed to coincide with a hard-coded
space ship moving across frame. The final title was chosen to be
Defence Tape Archive, 27B / Evaluation of Application of /
Orbital Atack Monkeys the title was introduced as a centered
title at final height but 0 width, the width grows sinusoidally
until held at maximum size then fading away again, inspiration
for this title effect came from the opening titles of Star-trek
nemesis.
The initial plan called for many camera angle changes this was
not implemented because the monkey always faces the camera in the
same way making changes in camera angle look artificial and
silly. also it would be a bit chaotic in a 30sec clip.
The tracking helmet was changed to a tracking force field with
transparency as its animation looked more fluid and i liked
dealing with transparent objects.
The 2nd visual object was changed from an asteroid that was hard
coded to collide with the monkey to a satellite dynamically
tracking the monkey so that it always points in the direction of
the monkey.
III. Visual objects and Background video and Audio
The visual objects consist of a transparent force field produced
in photoshop, and a satellite[1] cropped, rotated, background
removed and a black blue gradient overlay. the original image was
sourced from blog.timesunion's John de Rosier.
The background video is taken from a screen capture from the
computer game Kerbal Space Program (0.18.4)[2] in accordance with
there usage agreement where you can use the images for any
purpose to spread the awesomeness of the KSP. the video was
cropped to remove the HUD. the resulting video was preprocessed
to an image sequence because the codec used was incompatible with
nearly everything and reading the video in java was prohibitively
slow. Note the background video is actually moving it's just
slow. it can be best noticed by following a star near the
horizon.
The audio was taken from NASA and was a quindar[3] com check from
an Apollo mission but i have since distorted, looped, stretched
etc the audio until it is nothing but alien like garbled ambient
transmission noise. the original is in the source folder for
comparison. All media from NASA is free to use unless explicitly
stated otherwise.
IV. Implementation
the code was implemented in java utilizing the JMF library and
the classes provided in labs. The process of making the movie is:
1. pull frames from video (using FrameAccess class provided)
2. remove blue background
3. track object position
4. expand video to avoid clipping
5. overlay the force field image
6. crop the side of the image to remove the puppet operators
entrance into frame
7. overlay the new image on to the background video frame
8. calculating the angle to rotate the satellite image by
9. overlaying the satellite
10. adding titles
11. combining into video
12. muxing audio
A. Removing background
converting the image to HSV colourspace, and calculating the
difference in colour angle between blue and the pixels of the
image. if the colour difference is less then a threshold value
(0.25) and the saturation is greater than a threshold it means
the background is bright blue. then set the alpha channel to 0.
and if the colour difference is less than a different threshold
(0.5) then set the saturation to 0, this removes the blue from
the edge of the object.
B. Tracking object position
threshold the image and where the image is darker than the light
background (foreground object) add the x,y pixel location to a
variable. then use that to calculate the average position of the
threshold-ed image. this coordinate is the center of the object
by area. this coordinate can be used to center the force-field
object and calculate the angle for the satellite.
C. Scaling and Rotating
scaling and rotating the images was preformed by utilizing javas
built-in java.awt.geom.AffineTransform
D. Alpha Compositing
java's built-in graphic objects implement the alpha over
operation where the colours are mixed based on a weighting from
the alpha channel.
g.drawImage(image, 0, 0, null);
g.drawImage(overlay, ofset[0], ofset[1], null);
//this draws one image and then draws the other image over the
top preserving alpha contributions.
V. notes on how to run program
For the provided java code to run correctly the directory
structure must remain intact, this includes the inter/A inter/B
inter/C folders as well as the helper program ffmpeg.exe.
additionally the jar files in the lib folder must be linked. i
personally ran the program from within eclipse. after the project
is imported into eclipse or javac with appropriate parameters.
the MakeMovie.java's main method should be called as this will
start the procedure. on completion there should be 2 .mov files
in the output directory, one will have sound and one will not.
The code burned to the DVD will have the inter directorys
prepopulated as with the output. when run in this state the
program will just regenerate all the files and over write them.
if you must check if the program is actually making the files the
inter files may be removed but the sub-folders A, B, C etc must
remain but may be empty.
also note that the program does take its time and will generate
around a 800MB of temp files in the inter folders.
References
[1] [http://blog.timesunion.com/opinion/clean-up-space-with-tungsten-sandblaster
/12060/broadcasting-satellite/||http://blog.timesunion.com/opinion/clean-up-spac
e-with-tungsten-sandblaster/12060/broadcasting-satellite/]
[2] [https://kerbalspaceprogram.com/about.php||https://kerbalspaceprogram.com/ab
out.php]
[3] [http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/hskquindar.mp3||http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/hsk
quindar.mp3]