Light and movement were the two most important things that are happening in the little movies that I shot last week. There’s not a whole lot going on in terms of shape or symbolism, so I need to really focus on the things that can be adjusted that will make a difference.
The first variable that I wanted to be able to adjust was speed. I knew how to change the metronome to send out a bang to read the video player at a certain frame rate, so I thought that the ability to change that would get me what I was looking for.
Unfortunately, changing the “frame rate” in that way doesn’t actually affect the way that the movie plays, it just changes the rate at which the movie player displays what the reader is reading. I was able to create some jittery video, but I couldn’t get the video to play back any faster or slower. That’ll have to be something I look into later.
I do want to be able to change the brightness of the video, though, and fortunately, that’s something that was pretty directly covered in online tutorials.
Next, I wanted to be able to layer one video on top of another additively. I’m hoping that that could make for some fun disorienting kind of motion with lights moving in different directions. I don’t know if Max defaults to blending two videos together additively or not, but I figured I’d plug in a couple different videos to the same output and see what happens.
Well, the images did blend together the way that I had hoped they would, but the frame rate dropped down to about 4 frames a second (by my estimation). I wondered if maybe I had gotten something wrong in programming, but the more I played around in Max, the more it became apparent that the program was getting jammed up by having two videos play on the same player. Which isn’t necessarily a surprise, but I’m curious to find the best way to get these videos to blend together the way that I want them to.