While on paternity leave, I (finally) have time to do small projects that require little brain activity and lots of computation time. One of the things I have wanted to do for a long time is to create a videogram of Bergensbanen (which I briefly mentioned last year). This was a project undertaken by the Norwegian broadcast company (NRK), where they filmed (and broadcast live) the entire train trip from Bergen to Oslo. The best thing is that the entire 7.5 hour video file is available under a CC-license, which opens for many creative applications.
First I wanted to create a videogram based on reducing every single frame in the video file into a pixel stripe in the videogram. However, this is not possible to do in one operation in Max/Jitter, since the video file contains 1 302 668 frames. Jitter cannot export images larger than 32767 pixels wide, and even though I could have set it up to export images of subchunks of the original video, I am not sure if there are any programs that will support reading image files that are more than 1 million pixels wide?
So I have created a videogram based on sampling every 50th frame from the video file, based on a revised version of my VideoAnalysis program. The full videogram (26 056 x 720 pixels) can be found here or on Flickr.
I have also made a more browser friendly version (4096x720 pixels):
Besides just looking at the videogram, which I find quite fascinating in itself, such a display can also reveal various things that happened over time in the recording, e.g.:
- the NRK logo is rendered as a white line throughout the entire videogram
- tunnels are dark/black
- stops at stations can be seen when there are long non-moving parts in the image
These are summarized in this little image excerpt:
Now, this videogram was just a test case, as I am now working on creating videograms of the 5 day recording of Hurtigruten…