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Turn Real Life Into A Cartoon
Saige writes "Ever wanted to see yourself in a cartoon? Before now, there were means to turn a single image into something cartoon-like, but some folks at Microsoft Research have come up with a method to turn a video into an animated cartoon. It's not up to doing it fully automated, as you have to hand-mark various parts of the video every 10 to 15 frames, but the video of the results is quite impressive."
Similar to Waking Life, one of my all-time favorite movies. On the dvd, there's a 20 minute segment explaining the technology behind it...very labor intensive, as every curve ultimately still had to be hand-done.
And now for something completely different...a man with three buttocks.
no, but it would have made Waking Life and Bakshi's Lord of the Rings a lot easier.
If you're running at a good clip per second, that's several frames per second that you're giving it animation information. As the microsoft researcher says, it's interpolating between keyframes, smoothing for trajectory. It's probably also taking averages of color inbetween the frames, and running it through a natural media highlight algorithim. Think those oldfangled "morph" programs mixed with a photoshop filter.
It should be doing some edge detection for the inbetween frames, but it probably isn't. I hate to say this, but this is a simple application of known and existing technologies. Nifty for the guys that made it, but not exactly groundbreaking.
The ______ Agenda
This is basically a way of partially automating the process of rotoscoping, which goes back to the 1930s. It's not generally used because the resulting animation looks choppier and less cartoon-like; it's the reason why Ralph Bakshi's later films (Lord of the Rings, Cool World, American Pop) generally are considered not to look as good as his previous films: they were almost entirely rotoscoped.
Bít, zabít, jen proto, ze su liska!
Isn't it interesting how throughout the last several years we've been researching and coding like hell to take cartoon(ish) characters and make them look as realistic as possible? Look at the work that went into transforming an artist's sketches of Dr. Aki Ross et al into the very real looking characters of Final Fantasy.
Now we're researching and coding like hell to go back the other way.
I'm sure there's a Microsoft joke in there somewhere :)
You've got an easy breezy wind at your back...most of the time.
Just a thought. I've played with Photoshop/Paintshop Pro and various standard filters can turn individual photos into an artistic rendering eg. Brushstrokes or Charcoal drawing. What's to stop someone from writing software that will extract each image from a video, apply the filter and then re-encode to video? Has this already been done elsewhere?
As an aside I love the effect on pets using the charcoal filters drawing filters. The fur translates surprisingly well.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Only use WHQL certified drivers and you won't see STOP crashes.
While there is some truth to this, if you do this you will end up running very old (and sometimes quite buggy) video drivers. I haven't seen any recent video drivers that are WHQL certified. At least, not nVidia drivers. I suspect this is the same case with ATI as well. Probably not as much so for run-of-the-mill 2D cards.
While I've always loved to joke about how Windows blue screens at the drop of the hat, I have to say that XP has been relatively stable, both at work and at home.
The only time I've had my XP box regularly bluescreen was when I was using a quad-head configuration (two dual-head nVidia cards, one AGP, the other PCI) and booting into Linux. If I did a warm reboot from Linux into Windows, it would bluescreen every time. Power off the system, and it would boot up fine. I suspect someone was making some incorrect assumptions the state of video RAM when initializing the drivers.
-Twilight1
Some time ago, Microsoft purchased a company called SoftImage. Turned out to be a good investment in 3D development and film compositing with a product called the DS.
Meanwhile, in Tewksbury, the Avid Media Composer which ran only on the Apple Macintosh platform was ported to Windows when Microsoft made some investments in Avid. About that time Apple (unwisely) discontinued their six PCI-Slot Macintosh..
When Avid noted that their product was dead-ended because its code basis assumed a raster that was limited to NTSC and PAL television format, they purchased SoftImage's DS in order to be able to easily produce software that will do film and high definition video.
Microsoft doesn't make investments for nothing. I believe I can do something very close to what Microsoft is doing for Mini-DV video on any format of video or film with the Avid DS -- though for a lot more money (something like $120K USD). I would not be surprised if they got the technology from that very old investment.
As a creative person though, I have to say I don't like the fact that the DS-Nitris will probably never run on a Macintosh. We have problems with ours that are related mostly to two issues: Operator screw-ups (expected) and Microsoft Windows XP Professional limitations, many of which do not exist in Apple's current versions of Unix.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
As an aside, Win2K on my box has been running stable for over 3 months, and I run all kinds of weird shit on it.