Lots of things I would do differently now haha, but anyway, figured someone here might find it interesting.
https://github.com/akash-akya/hilbert-montage
Not an original idea, it was inspired by someone else at that time.
But that must be wrong, the README.md mentions it visualizing time.
I'd love to understand a bit more.
The README.md punts to Wikipedia on Hilbert curves, which is classic Wikipedia, makes sense if you understand it already :) and a 20 minute video on Hilbert curves, which I find hard to commit to, assuming its unlikely it touches on movie visualization via Hilbert curves.
It's definitely hard, and not your responsibility, to explain the scientific concept.
But, I'd love to have your understanding of how the visualization is more interesting.
If you imagine a movie as a line along the time axis with each frame as a pixel, there are multiple way to create an 2D image.
Bargraph is simple approach, but essentially it is still is a one dimensional. We are only using x axis.
Zig-zag pattern is another approach, where you start from top to bottom, left to right. But in this case the relative distance between close frames aren't fully preserved. Two distant frames might appear together, or close frames might end up far apart, which leads to odd looking artifacts.
Hilbert curve is a pattern to map 1D to fill space (2D) such that relative distance between any two points (frames) on the 1D line is somewhat preserved. That's why it appears as clump/blob.
Here it is hard to see the movie progression from start to end but all frames from a scene are always closer, which was what I was aiming. I find it interesting that visual aspect (color/scene) is easy to see here but temporal aspect isn't.
I was excited about the whole 1D to 2D mapping aspect at that time, leading to this toy.
This is using the linked python code - thanks for sharing, OP! - I didn't look into the details but it takes an incredibly long time to save .png files for the source frames despite only selecting 6,400 of them.
I built one of these back in the day. Part of the fun was seeing how fast I could make the pipeline. Once I realized that FFMPEG could read arbitrary byte ranges directly from S3, I went full ham into throwing machines at the problem. I could crunch through a 4 hour movie in a few seconds by distributing the scene extraction over an army lambdas (while staying in the free tier!). Ditto for color extraction and presentation. Lots of fun was had.
As a fun experiment several years ago I extracted all the frames of Skyfall and all the frames of the first Harry Potter movie.
I then reconstructed Harry Potter frame by frame using the corresponding frame from Skyfall that was most visually similar.
The end result was far more indecipherable than I'd ever expected. The much darker color pallet of Harry Potter lead to the final result largely using frames from a single dark scene in Skyfall, with single frames often being used over and over. It was pretty disappointing given it took hours and hours to process.
Thinking about it now, there's probably a way to compensate for this. Some sort of overall pallette compensation.
Learned about this from Mary Lou Jepsens 2013 TED talk, what a throwback
https://www.ted.com/talks/mary_lou_jepsen_could_future_devic...
I spent some time earlier this year on creating mosaics of movie posters using other posters as tiles: https://joshmosier.com/posts/movie-posters/full-res.jpg (warning: 20mb file) Using this on each frame of a scene gave some good results with a fine enough grid even with no repeating tiles: https://youtu.be/GVHPi-FrDY4
"Red," "White," and "Blue" is a trilogy of French films made by Polish-born filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski. Each movie follows the color pallet.
Modern digital movies are way too sharp, in a bad way.
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "scale=1:ih" frames_%04d.png
magick montage -mode concatenate -tile x1 frames_*.png "output.png"(you'd ideally do some "clever" processing to combine a number of frames into a single colour strip but that's obviously more faff than just a simple `ffmpeg` call...)
[0] e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35675529/using-ffmpeg-ho...
>bash: /usr/bin/montage: Argument list too long
with 114394 files for a 1h20m film.
>montage
>Version: ImageMagick 6.9.11-60 Q16 x86_64 2021-01-25
That and actors that mumble their words...
Again, with the dark movies. They seem to be color graded and encoded for HDR screens, and most HDR screens are really a fake type of HDR and so the movies just come out super dark. They look a lot less horrible on a really great high-end TV in a totally dark room.