Sunday, May 6, 2012

Image formats and whatnots

I reprogrammed my converter for the DMD animation to only support PNG-series instead of animated GIF's for several reasons, including -
* Each image is independently adjustable
* I have a lot of trouble finding software for Mac that can create animated GIF's
* The GIF-files can only have 256 colors, which means inevitable dithering of the source files

I believe this is also the way the P-Roc handles its conversion. It would be cool to know if they choose this path as well for the reasons I mentioned above.

Basically you enter "python convert.py foldername" and it reads all files in that folder, bakes it into a custom DMD format and stores a debug image of each frame in a debug folder inside the same dir. Very clean and a lot more flexible than animated GIF's.

I also added a brightness filter before each conversion so that the rather dark images will be pushed up into a more suitable range for the DMD to display. It could mean loss of the finer details, but I guess I'll have to experiment on this.

For example, this is with added brightness:



And this is the same image without:

A lot better, right?

However - compare these two...


There's clearly some unwanted artifacts caused from the brightness pushing, but the actual movie data looks a lot better with it activated. Oh, the decisions!

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