Overlaying on video

[Rick Harrison]

Hi Ben,

To try to answer the second part of your question first.
I think once a movie starts playing other LC messages don’t
have time to be sent. The video just takes over because
it’s showing each frame quickly so your eye tells you
it’s a movie.

One solution I had to use in the past to make a decent
animation was to break the movie into each frame and
then put each frame onto each card.  I had a short
movie so it ended up being 254 cards.  It was for iOS
so I needed to optimize for a cell phone processor.
Then I was able to have a graphic which appeared
on every card move on top of the changing cards.
So my animated character was able to move around
freely on top of a video background.  I was able to
adjust the timing of the loops so it looked pretty good.

Regarding the first part of your message:
I’m trying to duplicate some of your experience here.

> Eventually I discovered by accident that this only applies to some videos. For now, I got the job I needed to do done by rendering the original .mp4 into a .mov with QuicktimePlayer's default settings; I haven't had time to establish what the crucial factors are. Is this known/documented anywhere?

I tried importing a Quicktime movie which had the .mov suffix into LC.
I put a graphic on top of the movie and when I went to play the movie
the movie put itself on top of the graphic.  So what to I need to do to
recreate your solution?

Thanks,

Rick




> On Mar 26, 2017, at 6:54 PM, Ben Rubinstein via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm trying to overlay some graphics on a video, and hit a couple of problems.
> 
> The first, which drove me somewhat mad until I found an out, was that the video was always displayed on top of other LC elements - graphics, fields. This is using a player object; I found that the controller would be rendered correctly layered among other objects, and indeed would obey blending levels; and occasionally in tool mode the video frame would also; but once I switched back to browse mode and played the video, it invariably displayed on top of everything else, at 100% opacity. Toggling the "buffer" property did not appear to make a difference.
> 
> Eventually I discovered by accident that this only applies to some videos. For now, I got the job I needed to do done by rendering the original .mp4 into a .mov with QuicktimePlayer's default settings; I haven't had time to establish what the crucial factors are. Is this known/documented anywhere?
> 
> The second problem - which I also found frustrating because I'm sure I've done something similar before without this arising - was in triggering the updates to my overlay graphics. I thought that I could have a timer sending a regular message to my code which would check the time of the movie, and adjust graphics appropriately. The code worked but I only saw an update twice; when the movie started, and when it stopped. As far as I could tell this wasn't an issue about the screen not updating; but that the message genuinely wasn't sent while the movie was playing. Again, is this a known issue? Or do others think this should work, and I was just doing something wrong?
> 
> TIA,
> 
> Ben
> 
> _______________________________________________
> use-livecode mailing list
> use-livecode at lists.runrev.com
> Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences:
> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode