Movies are
great for mosaics because they contain a lot of images. And as you know we need
a lot of images for to create good photographic mosaics.
Your first
step is to find a movie and to import it into an AVI file. For example
- Use your
video camera to make some nice movies while you are at holiday.
- Rent or
Buy a VHS casette or a DVD
- Download
a movie file from Internet
Downloading something from Internet is probably
the simplest solution, because else you need a Card in your PC for to import
the VHS into your computer and translate it in an AVI File. Another solution is
read the movie from a DVD, but I never did this. At last the only requirement
is that your movie file can be opened with Windows Media Player. If you have an
MPG file and you can open it with Windows Media Player then you can open it
also with AndreaMosaic (maybe you only need to rename it to .AVI).
AndreaMosaic have an integrated tool for
extracting images from a movie. But of course you can use any kind of program
that analyze the Movie file and extract a lot of Images.
Instructions:
Parameters
of Extract from Movie Dialog
Position
and Size - PosX,Y, Size:
The first four parameters are the size of the
frame that you want to extract. Normally you can leave the default values, but
if you see in the Sample Frame that the white rectangle is bigger than the
image then you should change the values to a smaller frame. Whenever you change
the position or size, then press the button Show Frame to update the
white rectangle. If you do not see well the image of the movie try with a
different frame by pressing the button Random Frame. It will choose
another image.
Extract
Frame From:
This two parameters let you choose which
interval of frames should be extracted. The default values are all the movie.
But you can setup smaller values, for example to discard the first images. You
can press then button First Frame or Last Frame to show the first
visible frame you choosed.
How many
frames?:
Usually in a movie there are really a lot of
frames, all similar each other. So practically we need only a small amound of
images. Here you can choose how many images you want. I suggest 5000 as a
minimum value, but if you can also try 20.000 frames, this will produce better
mosaics since you have more images, especially with long movies.
The program will then extract 5000 frames
evenly distributed between the first and last frame you choosed in order to get
the best possible images without too many similar ones.
De-Interlace
every frame:
Set this option only if you see “strange”
horizontal lines disturbing the image. Typically when your movie file is
recorded from a video camera or VHS cassette. Its better if you can avoid to
use De-Interlace because technically this option reduce the image quality in
order to remove the lines.
File
Format:
If you want to use the images for to create
mosaics then you have to choose [x] JPG Format. The BMP option is only for your
convenience.
Quality
of saved files:
This parameter is needed only if you save JPG
Images, it says the compression of every image. Higher value give bigger files
but with better quality. A default value of 50% is ok, but you can use higher
or even lower values. Normally for the mosaic use the images will be resized to
smaller images so usually it is not necessary to have a high quality.
Once you have extracted a good amount of images
use a Image Browser to take a look at all the frames. I suggest to delete
duplicated or not nice images. I always check all the frames, with a good
browser of images you can see the thumbnails of 50 images in one screen and
delete immediately the one you don’t like.
At last you can create the Image Collection based on the extracted
frames.