Five Days of Pure Data – Stop Motion

In the years that I’ve been creating things in Pure Data I have amassed quite a collection of unfinished and messy patches. Over the next few days I’ll be releasing a few of these patches and techniques that I implement when programming in Pure Data.

Stop Motion

It was at the Co-Position meeting of the Libre Graphics Research Unit in 2012 that I first encountered Toonloop. It’s creator, Alexandre Quessy, gave a live performance using lights, Lego pieces and other objects. I was really quite in awe of how stop-motion was used to create quite an enjoyable performance.

Of course my first instinct was to try and recreate this but in Pure Data. I wasn’t the first to try, and I in fact have some memory of seeing Toonloop’s creator himself trying to write something similar in Pure Data although I can’t find any sources…

My first instinct to recreate Toonloop was to use [pix_write] to write a series of images and then play those back using [pix_image]. The problem there is that there’s no easy way to read an arbitrary set of images from a directory.

In the end I learnt about [pix_buffer_write] which allowed me to story an image frame into a buffer which I can then call back using [pix_buffer_read]. So that’s the basic functionality sorted! When I went to Databit.me in 2013 Axel Debeul helped to improve the patch a lot. The improvements allowed me to save a video from each animation. You can find the most recent version of the patch below

That’s where the problems start to arise, some of which I haven’t solved yet. The videos are created via [pix_record]. When a frame is captured it is sent to [pix_record] and then recording is paused. However, when you look at the saved video it has a really weird frame rate and doesn’t play smoothly. Even when the frame rate is set explicitly it somehow doesn’t work.

Don’t ask me about the cat ears

Perhaps making a video out of the animations is something to be done in post processing rather than in Pure Data. [pix_record] has always been a very complicated object to work with so perhaps I need to investigate further and try to find the right configuration of all of its many options.