easiest way was angus40 showed me how to use After Effects to get it synced exactly, have heard/seen that xl4 should be able to do something along the same line??? Cheers Boof63
You are going to need a lot of pixels to play a movie on. https://vimeo.com/114314817 39min in Sean will show you how to import a movie into nutcracker. The first 39min talks about Glediator, Which if I remember correctly Eddy spoke about this program at the Sydney mini last year and being able to import a live camera feed and convert it straight to your matrix.
You could do that since xLights3. With xLights4 it will be easier if you need to align the audio since you can just drag the picture effect with respect to the audio waveform. Basically you use ffmpeg which is included with the xLights installation to break up a video into still frames. Each frame ends with -1, -2, -3, etc. Then use the picture effect and point to the first frame and it will automatically advance through the frames to create the sequence. I have this video where I did this in version 3. You can do the same basic steps with version 4 just use the Picture effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9IAfYdYzwU
HLS also has this capability. Once you use ffmpeg or After Effects to convert the video clip into .png images (same procedure as talked about above), you would just select "convert folder of PNG images to effect" and you would have an effect to place on a pixel plane. You can then manipulate it and move it etc ....makes things very easy.
Hey Dr, it's been a while. Is there a video on this or a thread to follow? I haven't done any sequencing for a while and started back this morning. I'd like to investigate playing movies within HLS.
I tried this method (multiple times) but my video (or series of png files) plays back slowly. I tried a number of different settings within the ffmpeg command prompt (tried 20fps, 25fps, 50fps, 10fps) but to no avail. I am currently using xLights 3.6.15. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Update: Perseverance pays off. It's only taken me most of the afternoon, but I've got it sorted now.
I just threw together my 1st matrix this weekend (6 x P10 panels = 3072 pixels) and just have to mount them to hardboard so I have a way to hang it to do more testing. Once I have it sorted, I'll get back to you on what works best. Last year was more or less making each .png image separately and sequentially (same as cartoon animation) and then using HLS to create an effect from the .png images. Very simple, but some trial and error to get it to play at speed I wanted. The only issue I see for me using Ron's controller and HLS is in the channel mapping and in setting up a preview. I think this is going to take a bit of time to sort out.
