Stéphane Cousot has been working the past few weeks for the Atelier Hypermedia on external Processing libraries. For the moment, his job has simply been to dig into the source code and report back on how the thing works. From there, he’ll start building additional libraries not yet available within the Processing community. My first request was for a true video export library, allowing us to directly build Quicktime movies within Processing, rather than exporting images one-by-one and then reassembling them in an external application. As reported elsewhere, I ultimately want to use Processing as a creative glue to hook up the various ateliers in the school, as our school project mandates: i.e. Video <> 3d <> Robotics <> Electronics <> Sound <> Printmaking, in no particular order.
From there we plan to expand into other neglected areas. Perhaps PDFs next (in fact Stéphane already built a prototype for such a library in a few minutes). Or perhaps something for building InDesign or xPress projects (anyone know a good open source alternative?). Our idea being that our needs in Aix-en-Provence pretty quickly exhaust the eternal spindly lines that often passes for cutting-edge Processing work. Of course we too so far have for the most part been generating nothing but eternal spindly lines in class, with the exception of some brilliant second year students a few weeks back (more on that later when their documentation is finished). Ultimately we want to move beyond that (next semester, for example), and we’re going to need more polyvalent tools to get some of that work done. Processing is for me the perfect base (simple, light, spare), but a base that only takes on it’s true potential when its fleshed out through libraries.
Anwyay, Stéphane has just posted a little snippet showing how to pull your image out of Processing. It’s pretty compact and obvious, and all the comments are in English. Check it out : SaveAsPNG. It makes it a lot clearer how Casey and Ben added access to the Java Graphics Context, and to the image generated inside of that context.
Original Comments:
Tom
I’m pretty sure PDF output is in the works for a future version of Processing, to be specified as different renderer like P3D and OPENGL, and then saveFrame() and so on will output PDF.
It’s worth taking a good look around http://dev.processing.org and posting on the discourse forum to make sure you’re not about to duplicate work.
Douglas Edric Stanley
Yes, I’ve been following the various libraries projects fairly closely at dev.processing.org. Stephane is French so he hasn’t really gotten into the forums enough yet, but I’ll eventually drag him in.
It’s actually pretty hard to get good visibility on who is doing what. Often people ask to create a central spot to track external library projects and thus avoid duplicating work, but no one has constructed it yet. This is understandable, as everyone is overloaded already.
Anyway, we’ll put up a post when we know exactly which libraries we’re going to develop. So far the PDF idea is a hypothesis. That said, I’m more interested in building complex PDF’s, not just a single PDF image export along the lines of TIFF export.
radarboy
If there’s one thing that will make a lot of peope happy (well maybe just me) is an implementation of JMF video library. Lightning fast video tracking will change the whole ball game (well, again, for me, at least :) ).
Douglas Edric Stanley
Damn! I know the blog-world is old, but I’m still having a hard time getting used to the synergy.
I just got off the phone with Stéphane who was (successfully) convincing me of the importance of using JMF instead of Quicktime. I’ve had bad experiences with Win VDig, so his idea really spoke to me. He was also worried about the Linux/Quicktime/iTunes issues, that he suggests might turn off some people. So I left off Stéphane and ten seconds later (literally) my blog informs me of your post.
We’re going to talk about this on the dev.processing list. Let’s see who jumps on board. Whatever the case Stéphane has some experience with it already. A lot more than me, as I’ve been trapped in Macromedialand for the last few years.
stéphane
well, we are of our time, Douglas, or there are something in the air.
I just leave the P5 forum to see if some investigations to build a complete video library (with JMF) is in process… I have not yet all the answers.
hum ! this is completely unofficial, but I definitely think that we need to make it. Really. You need to be patient radarboy …