Quartz Composer – Movie Time-line Thumbnail Viewer

Here’s a tool I have made that I use to create an instant sheet of thumbnails from a movie. I use it to analyze animations that I have digitised from my own video collection.

Download Link: movie_thumbnail_viewer_001.qtz.zip

It works in principle but there are a number of issues I’ll go into in a moment. It is an early version of an idea that could produce instant time-lines, retrospective after-the-fact storyboards, onion skinning and other video frame manipulations. I use it to visualize the flow and movement of time-based imagery and to produce illustrations for lectures. It is the kind of process that makes Quartz Composer a pleasure to use. To produce such a layout in Photoshop would take a good deal of preparation and layout work. I love the grid layout and the visual effects produced by this patch – as images in their own right.

Basic Operation

You set the path to a quicktime movie.
Make some basic choices about number of frames per row, number of rows (you need to enable / disable each row as needed)
Set the time interval / frame shift to jump on each row.

Image (above): Frames demonstrating early pioneering rotoscoping from Dave Fleischer’s “Snow White” (1933) with Betty Boop and Cab Calloway (full copyright acknowledged).

Image (above): Sequences from Bill Plympton’s “Your Face” (1987) (full copyright acknowledged)

Some Issues

Here are some of the important issues that need to be improved:

• Performance.

The patch runs slowly. I am sure you could do a similar thing programmatically with QTKit that would be much faster in the generation of the rows / thumbnails. I may even have a bug / design flaw where each row gets iterated more than once.

• Manual Tweaking

It is always a design goal for me to have no manual tweaking necessary, for a composition to do it’s work with the minimum amount of set-up. This patch needs more work in this regard.

• QC Bug – Some codecs produce unexpected results [bug submitted]

It seems some codecs (I forget which from my tests – I mentioned it on the qc-dev list) produce unexpected results. i.e. only two different thumbnails are generated and they then alternate across the sequence. Some sizing / aspect ratio issues of the thumbnails when the viewer is resized

I have fixed this issue on other similar patches I have made – but have yet to implement the fix here. This patch would benefit a rigorous going over. I’d love to hear from anyone who finds it useful.

Additional Details

Images (above): the optional ‘info’ panel and math patch. This part of the composition is interesting and the maths contained there-in could for the basis for a future improved implementation.

Image (above): The basic macro with most of the important published ports