from Director (TTC) to oF - where to start?

beginners
#1

(disclaimer: this question is WAY more ‘beginner’ than most of what I’m reading in this section, so feel free to recommend I post it elsewhere…)

I am working on a motion tracking video piece, where motion is tracked from a sequence of images, and triggers blobs of images to appear in a projected video. I created this very raw demo by hand: http://cynthialawson.com/temp/test-lawson.mov

I want to be able to track all changes in the source footage (the one on the right) and have those changes start to reveal parts of a base image (what you see on the left.) The video has been pre-recorded so I could do this in AfterEffects, but this is a prototype of a larger project I would like to implement, and learning oF for this sounds exciting.

This is my first time working with oF and my last projects with video & motion tracking were coded using Director and TrackThemColors, but I’m at a loss as to where to start. (I read Nat Stern’s wiki entry on oF for Director users.)

From many examples online I understand I need to use the openCV library, correct? How do I “use” that in oF? Any particularly relevant examples that you can provide?

Thank you!

Cynthia

#2

openCV is the standard tool most of us use for computer vision. Using it in OF is very easy since it’s been wrapped as an addon: you can look in your addons examples folder, open the openCV example and you’ll make an idea of how to use the library and how to track people.

#3

Thank you, but where is the addons folder? In my oF folder I see apps, libs, other, and scripts. I looked in each one but couldn’t find what you’re describing (which sounds like precisely what I need!)

#4

Back on track, thank you! I had downloaded the non “FAT” version of oF so I was missing the addons and addons examples.

//Cynthia