Video Art In Python

I wrote a wee utility script in Python to process video in an 'arty' way. Outputs take the form of a video, or, more commonly, a still image. With the latter, the central idea is the collapse of the video's time dimension in various ways.

The various 'modes' can be summarised thusly:

Slitscan/Striper: process an input video into an output still image by capturing a line of pixels from each frame of the video. 'Slitscan' captures row/column 1 from frame 1, row/column 2 from frame 2, etc. 'Striper' always captures the midline row/column from each video frame.
Tiler: process an input video into an output still image by capturing a small swatch from a video frame at regular intervals. This one can be a fun way to 'summarise' a busy video into a single image.
Mirror: process an input video into an output video by mirroring it along its horizontal or vertical midline.

To demonstrate, consider the following images:

Mode/Sub-mode	Beach Scene	Slowly Rotating Flower
Still from input video
mode: slitscan; submode: 0
mode: slitscan; submode: 1
mode: striper; submode: 0
mode: striper; submode: 1
mode: tiler; submode: 10x10
Still from output video; mode: mirror; submode: 0
Still from output video; mode: mirror; submode: 1
Still from output video; mode: mirror; submode: 2
Still from output video; mode: mirror; submode: 3

Since I'm using a little bit of OpenCV to do some of the processing, the easiest way to run my ArtVideo.py script is via Docker.

Paste the following command into a bash script:
docker run -it --rm --name ArtVideo --mount type=bind,source="$(pwd)"/ArtVideo,target=/app -w="/app" yoanlin/opencv-python3 python3 ArtVideo.py $@
... and call that script with the --help option to get some guidance about the script parameters.

Addendum: slightly related (and the subject of a parallel project): motion extraction.

Enjoy!

All Video Art In Python assets by Chris Molloy are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

VIDEO ART IN PYTHON