dzebel

26th April 2004 23:56 UTC

Multiple photos
Does anyone know of a plug-in that would allow all of the images in a folder to be randomly displayed (one at a time of course)? I use to use Sony's SonicStage and it came with a random viz that had editable overlays of shapes which was great for customizing. So I am looking for something close to the same. It would be awesome to have text that would stream through the viz as well. Whatta think?

z

hungryskull

27th April 2004 00:16 UTC

This has nothing to do with AVS, nor does it really relate to winamp.

dzebel

27th April 2004 00:21 UTC

I guess that I would not agree. I think that if there were a way to use photos, pictures, etc. as a backdrop to the viz then many people would love it. In essence if the transparency of the viz were changed then photos could be used. Sounds cool and relevant to me.

TomyLobo

27th April 2004 10:20 UTC

try using multiple effect lists with adjustable blending as output blending mode and set the alpha by code, using the Evaluation override checkbox

if you don't know what i'm talking about then you're probably in the wrong forum ;)

Warrior of the Light

28th April 2004 22:01 UTC

If there is such a plug-in (not APE) for Winamp, then it would be used in the place of AVS in Winamp (so therefor not being AVS related). Within AVS there is no such thing, you could use effect lists indeed, but you would have to select all images manually.

Deamon

28th April 2004 22:12 UTC

And avs is certainly not about displaying images, but about visualizing music.

piR

29th April 2004 21:59 UTC

And what's about Picture II and other Texers ? ;)
Images can also be used to make visualizations based upon the music !
For example, you can change to the next image (randomly or not) in a chosen folder, every n beats, or using an evaluation.
In a way, it's nothing more than a enhancement of Picture II (may be Picture III :) ).

TomyLobo

30th April 2004 00:32 UTC

have a look at the picture II source
if you know a bit C (or any language of that complexity) you should see that Picture II doesn't read the bmp in every frame. it creates a work image (actually 2: 1 for normal mode, 1 for bilinear mode) of the picture in memory and renders from there.
to accomplish what you suggest, picture II would have to be written to store 2 work images for each picture in the chosen directory.
say we have 10 pics, and have 320x240 resolution. that'd make a total of
320*240*32bits/8*10pictures=6144000 bytes
nearly 6 MB for just 10 pics at a low resolution...
and if you don't use work images, then the rendering will be VERY slow
if you chose to generate the work images onbeat, you'd no longer have a fluent visualization because loading a bmp (or even a jpg/png) from the causes a slowdown which WILL be visible

piR

30th April 2004 10:58 UTC

What's 6 Mo on computers which can have up to 1 Go !!
On the other hand, I agree with you, it's not really useful as long as you can have the same results using Effect lists ;)

TomyLobo

30th April 2004 12:25 UTC

err... pir 6 MB is for 320x240 with 10 pics
let's use 1024x768 and say 50 pics :)
that would be 150 MB *g* just for the images... i think that's quite a lot if you use win2k or even xp on systems with less than 512 MB RAM

dzebel

30th April 2004 14:42 UTC

I easily ran SonicStage's "Random" Viz with a whole folder full of 750kB+ photos. Here's my opinion. Winamp rocks because of cool people like TomyLobo, piR, and many more MATHEMATICAL GODS! I think that Sony's cheap version has one very rocking viz that sparks my imagination. So if those Sony demi-gods can do that, what can you all do? I don't know if I have clearly communicated. I myself (and me) and not a MATHEMATICAL GOD, nor a demi-god. I'm just a lowly puke. So I need some plug-in that is "plug and play" to some extent.

I am hoping to use this in the following way. At summer camp, we will take pictures of children as they play. At the conclusion of camp, it would be SOOOOO rocking to have those pictures behind some really groovy "eye candy" (ie bouncing, waving, pulsing waves of lines, colors, etc.). Sony's product achieves this by having a second overlay that stacks on top of the photos and has very hip shapes that move and turn different colors.

So what do you all think?

TomyLobo

2nd May 2004 16:40 UTC

if you need a plug&play plugin for viewing pictures then AVS is maybe not the right thing to use :(

and about sonicstage: i think it loads the pictures in the background. to achieve this, you need some kind of multitasking between 2 parts of one program. this is normally achieved by using multiple so-called "threads"
one of the thread renders the image on the screen and another one loads the next image.
Sadly, this is not easily achievable in AVS, since you only have 1 thread in an APE and can't spawn a new one as far as I know

but i have an idea of how to achieve what you meant without any improvements on the AVS side:
combine all the pictures to a .avi file so that each picture is a frame of the video. then use Render/AVI in an OnBeat Effect List. this way you can use many pictures and let them change onbeat

btw: math gods=Jheriko and UnConeD :)