Tor, I wrote/maintain a project that does what you're describing. In realtime, even! :) http://freshmeat.net/projects/show/?topic_id=111,112 ...Might be worth looking into for such a plug-in. I made it as modular as possible, so making a gimp plugin [out of it | for it] may not be too much of a stretch. Cheers, Bowie J. Poag <bpoag@xxxxxxxxxxx> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tor Lillqvist" <tml@xxxxxx> To: <gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2003 2:54 PM Subject: [Gimp-developer] "Ken Burns" style animation tool: standalone orplug-in? > (No, I haven't seen any Ken Burns documentaries (AFAIK), but his name > comes up all the time when googling for stuff to do this kind of > animation I am talking about here. He probably is known to the > Americans on this list?) > > I have recently toyed with the thought of writing a tool to produce > (low (TV) resolution) animations (for writing to VCD or DVD, mainly) > from (high resolution) still images. I.e. if you have some > multi-megapixel image, with the tool you could produce animations > where you zoom in/out, pan the over some straight or curved path, > rotate the viewport, etc. Seems like a nice way to put a bit more > "life" into your digital image slideshows. > > (For a simple and small commercial standalone tool that does this (on > Windows), check out MovingPicture from Stage Tools, > www.stagetools.com. Demo version downloadable.) > > Would it be better to write this as a GIMP plug-in, or a standalone > tool? > > If written as a GIMP plug-in, it seems natural to use GIMP's Bezier > paths to define the path along which the "virtual camera" moves. Lots > of code saved there. As a plug-in, it would perhaps most closely > resemble the "Easter Egg" plug-ins as it isn't really a filter, > doesn't render anything into a new image, nor does is save or load > images. Hmm. > > The "Ken Burns" plug-in would need to associate more data with the > path. The path nodes would correspond to keyframes between which the > tool would interpolate zooms and camera movements. Each keyframe > would have an associated time values and "virtual camera" orientation > and size vector. (To be able to zoom or rotate without moving the > virtual camera, path nodes might have several associated keyframes.) > > The plug-in would provide a GUI to define the keyframes and their > attributes, and a preview window, but not do the actual rendering of > the animation to AVI, MPEG or whatever format itself, just output a > "recipe" that would then be used by a separate batch-oriented program > to actually render the animation. It should also be possible to load > such a saved recipe and continue working on it, of course. > > One difficult thing is how to handle the fact that it is possible that > the user edits the path while the "Ken Burns" plug-in is active and > already has fetched its data with gimp_path_get_points(). > > Should there be some way for plug-ins to register interest in getting > callbacks when paths nodes are moved/added/deleted, etc? Other > plug-ins for new kinds of functionality might similarily be interested > in getting callbacks when selections are modified, etc. Is there > currently any way for plug-ins to get asynchronous callbacks for > events like these? > > --tml > > > _______________________________________________ > Gimp-developer mailing list > Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
