CompuServe Thread

I think I'm the one who originally brought this up way back when (back before Release 2.01a was announced, let alone shipped!, and I was told then that it was placed on the wishlist. I, too, figured that it would be a LOT of usability "bang" for a comparatively little programmer-time "buck" and was disappointed not to see it changed in Release 2.01a. I was even more disappointed to not see it changed in Release 3. What happened!? Fortunately we now have an ImMIX VideoCube, so it's not as critical for us as it was in the days when we mainly used our Sony PVW-2800 Betacam-SP with Soft-VTR VTPADI, but I'm thinking mainly now about those who still do use such equipment. What we did was VP Record Range up to and including the first static section's first frame, then use the front panel controls on the Sony to manually do an "Auto" Edit, then Set InPoint to the end of that Auto Edit, then another VP Record Range of the next animated segment, and so on, and so on, and so on. It required more "babysitting," but it greatly decreased the total time involved and saved lots of hours on the Sony's wear-and-tear counters. Mr. Bailey is correct: the algorithm needed to detect identical frames is minor heuristics, not rocket science. In the interests of speeding up work on this, I will hereby provide the algorithm for you: (Video Post is looping to count frames for an auto-multiframe-record — this would be done BEFORE the normal processing of a frame, and would be skipped entirely if the Multi-Frame flag were set to FALSE): DO Does this frame contain any of the following? 1. .FLCs or a sequence of numbered images or .IFLs anywhere in the queue, including Transitions and Alpha masking 2. Any Transitions at all, for that matter? 3. Any .EXEs or .BATs called? (These could conceivably change the contents of what would otherwise be a single image file, such as in the case of rotoscoping.) 4. Any .IXPs called? (Some are animated — perhaps a checkbox could be added to the .IXP Setup dialog which would indicate whether it is animated or not, to allow non-animated ones to be included in an automatic multi-frame edit.) 5. Any Keyframer Scene entries? 6. Any .BXP images loaded? (Those could be animated without notice as well.) 7. Any entries that were not present, or were different in any way, in the previous frame? IF Yes THEN Record multiframe of current display buffer with current frame count. Set Multi-Frame flag to FALSE. Set next InPoint to this frame we're about to process further. EXIT DO ELSE Increment frame count by 1. END IF LOOP (Process current frame normally, but don't record) (Video Post has just completed the processing of a frame and has its new contents in the video buffer): Does this frame contain any of the above items except for #7? IF Yes THEN Record single frame. Advance InPoint and OutPoint to next frame. ELSE Set Multi-Frame flag to TRUE. Set frame count to 1. END IF (Video Post repeats main loop until end of VP Record sequence.)