Video-2-Slit-Scan

Video-2-Slit-Scan allows you to create a slit-scan image from a video. It provides a graphical interface for adjusting slit position and size. Video-2-Slit-Scan can support very large videos with modest RAM since it streams in the input video and writes out the output image to disk in chunks. Released for Windows and macOS (Mac/Apple/OS-X) as free software under the MIT license.

slit-scan generated from Wellspring Fords video, 2017

Quickstart

Install

macOS

• Download Video-2-Slit-Scan for Mac v0.2.3 (107 mb)
• Double-click the downloaded file and drag the Video-2-Slit-Scan icon to the Applications folder link

Tested on macOS Sierra 10.12.6. DMG comes bundled with Java 1.8.0_91.

Windows

• Install Java 8 JRE or later. Be sure to install the 64-bit version if you have 64-bit Windows.
• Download the Video-2-Slit-Scan for Windows v0.2.3 (49.6 mb)

Linux

Video-2-Slit-Scan is written in Processing / Java / Gradle / Eclipse so it should be able to run on Linux, but I have not yet been able to verify it working do to issues with the Processing Video library on arm64.

See all Releases and Release Notes.

Usage

• Launch the App
• Click Open Video File, choose a video
• Click Generate Slit-Scan Image, a slit-scan image with default settings will saved to your Desktop

Screenshots

Features

• Given an input video, create a single output TIF grabbing a single vertical slice from each frame
• Adjust position and size of slit
• Manually adjust slit position as video plays
• Create moving slits over time by specifying slit position at keyframes and interpolating between keyframes over time
• Performance. Video-2-Slit-Scan Should support very large input videos and very large output images. Videos are streamed in as needed, output images are not stored entirely in memory, but instead written to disk in small chunks. NOTE, that this allow allows previewing the output image using your OS image viewer during generation.

Background

Slit-scan photography, imaging and cinematography have a long history in film and digitally. This app allows you to experiment with one slit-scan technique digitally (converting a video to a single image). This app was originally commissioned by Jan Kubasiewicz who has created many beautiful works exploring various slit-scan techniques.

See also Strip photography for a more technical discussion on various techniques and history. Also known as streak images, streak photography, slit camera and slit scan camera.

Developer Notes

New Developer Setup

• Install Eclipse Neon (or later)
• run after-pull.sh
• Import Project Into Eclipse

Build Installers:

Set JAVA_HOME environment variable to a Java 1.8 installation, then run:

./gradlew createDmg    
./gradlew createExe
./gradlew distTar

Debug Windows build.

To get additional JVM logging, launch Video-2-Slit-Scan from the Command Prompt with l4j flag. This will generate an extra launch4j log file with uncaught Runtime Exceptions.

video-2-slit-scan.exe --l4j-debug-all

Debug Mac build.

To get additional logging, control-click on application icon, click Show Package Contents, browse to Contents > MacOS and double-click JavaAppLauncher. Logging will show up in the Terminal window.

Create or Update App Icons

Mac

• Create PNG image 1024x1024
• Convert to iconset folder with Icon Generator
• Tweak individual icons if need be rename icons to Apple's latest scheme
• Rename folder to icon.iconset
• Convert to icns file with iconutil -c icns -o icon.icns icon.iconset then copy into icon.icns into the doc/ directory

Windows

• Create PNG images (see windows docs for latest sizes), currently 16,32,48,256
• Convert to .ico using ImageMagick convert icon-16.png icon-32.png icon-48.png icon-256.png icon.ico
• Copy .ico file to doc/ directory