Ideas and Suggestions on Generating Frames for a Movie

[Dave]

Hi All,

I have a new project coming up in two weeks or so. It's to generate  
test movies for use in the analysis of TV, Film and Video Game  
equipment.

The type of thing that is needed is to allow the user to set a Frame  
Size and rate (Frames Per Second), specify a background color, shapes  
that fit within the Frame (Rectangles, Circles, Polygons, etc), the  
movement of the shapes and the number of frames that this should last  
for. For example:

The User sets a frame size of 1024 x 768 and 25 FPS.

The User sets the Background color to white.

The User sets a Rectangle of 256 x 256 and a color of black, starting  
at the top left of the frame.

The User sets the number of frames to 100 and starts the movie. This  
should then generate a 4 second movie that white except for a black  
rectangle covering just over 25% of the picture.

This is a very simple case, a slight more complicated one would be  
the same as above, but the 256 x 256 rectangle should change color  
from/to black to red every 5 frames.

To add some more complexity the rectangle should move back and forth  
between position 0,0 and 500, 300 every 5 frames.

And so on..........................

I know how to do most of this. I have an external command module that  
can generate QuickTime movies and I know how to  create rectangles  
etc and move them around the frame. However I am not sure how to  
render everything inside the frame, e.g. what I would like to be able  
to do is it put the background pixels into a pixel buffer, then the  
pixels of each object in the frame into a the same pixel buffer  
(overwriting the background) and then pass this buffer to an external  
command that would write one frame of the QuickTime movie. After  
writing a frame, it would then change the colors of the objects,  
perform any movement or size change and render out the next frame.

The movie doesn't have to be written in "real time", it really  
doesn't matter if it takes 30 seconds to generate 10 a second movie.

Not sure if this can be done in RunRev?

All the Best
Dave