WTF 4 variations #3 - OK Go video remix

THIS IS FOUR VIDEOS (#9-#12), NOT ONE VIDEO.

This is a set of 4 different videos showing variations of an idea. It is not a single splitscreen video. It is not intended for the whole thing together to be aesthetically pleasing. It is just a technique to show you all four variations at once, to save you time and to let you compare them.

"WTF" is a song from OK Go's 2010 album Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky. It has an official music video, and released raw greenscreen footage inviting video "remixes". In these videos you'll find a nerdy study of the original OK Go video, exploring variations of the "trick" of the original video, using only the original video for source content.

In the first set of 4 variations, I used only the original data and some simple, song-independent algorithms. In the second set, I added timing information, allowing infinite echoes timed to match beats or measures of the song.

Now we're finally going to fire up what I feel the "right" way to do video echoes is. Each image is composited of all of its echoes, and old echoes get an "alpha value" that makes them more transparent. If we draw the newest image opaque, then it covers over stuff behind it, and a normal echo algorithm (with feedback) would leave that covered over; there'd be no way to see what's behind it. It would just look the same as the original video, or the bottom left of variations #2, but with the old data fading to white.

Instead, under this scheme, you can see through the old echoes.

Starting with this video, I corrected the source data from 29.97fps to just under 24fps, dropping the duplicate frames that had been injected into the greenscreen footage. This makes things less jerky.

TOP LEFT: An echo every beat. This has a similar effect as the top-left of variations #2 ("infinite beat echo"), except they fade out over time, and you can see through the echoes.

TOP RIGHT: An echo every measure. This is similar to the top-right of variations #2 ("infinite measure echo"), except they fade out over time, and you can see through the echoes.

BOTTOM LEFT: An echo every beat, and then "sub echoes" every frame. It's not the same as echoes every frame because the "on beat" echoes are "stronger". The effect is sort of as if there were echoes every beat, and then the sub echoes are more like reverb, smearing out the beat images.

BOTTOM RIGHT: An echo every measure, and then "sub echoes" every frame. Not terribly interesting, but there for completeness.

All of these videos are created using custom software I wrote explicitly for processing the WTF video. This includes my own green-screen processing, which is why the green-screen removal isn't very good in places. The echo is implemented as a multi-tap delay with up to 200 taps and no feedback.

This time I allowed the code to manipulate the alpha values of the echoes. Next time I'll look at letting the code manipulate the colors of the echoes. Further in the future maybe I'll allow the images to be shrunk (video tunnel effect), enlarged, rotated, or warped, and even further in the future I might do 3D.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• OK Go
• okgo
• wtf

[SamECircle]

oh man, cross your eyes so his head overlaps! Woah!

[davidmao1990]

wats the name of the effect????

[Piccolola]

GYAH! watching this is kinda trippy.... but I like it! :D

[tehfrog]

this is epic.