i built a laser projector a while back. it was a rite of passage for me, but that's a story for another day.
i have no interest in shows. i want to make art and unstick the images in my head.
here i am with a little box of science (i call it the satellite of love) in my living room. there's something seductive in its physical presence. the mass, the hum of fans, the otherworldly light that flickers out.
i bought LSX and an etherdream DAC. it's an awesome combination. i've made some good shows.
there's some great show content on the pl ftp site. i grabbed it all, discarded the junk, and watched "walk like an egyptian" about a hundred times.
in an earlier time, i used to do 3d work for video. at university i did performance art with amigas and flickering wireframe animations. nights and nights of rendering time with little 680x0's and frame recorders. the wireframe aesthetic stuck with me. during my chicago years, i did a series of photographs with laser projection grids on nudes.
i'm wandering, but i think you can see where i'm going with this.
i'm not interested in making flickering neon cartoons. that's what video projectors are for. i want polygons and lines and strange geometries.
LSX included ILD SOS. i spent some time converting bitmaps to svgs with inkscape and piping them through ILD SOS. it works well and is great for a frame or two, but useless for a long sequence of frames. inkscape has a command shell. it may do the trick, but i was a little annoyed at how it worked under osx and i decided to switch gears.
the bitmap to path conversion routine in inkscape is based on potrace. i grabbed the source for potrace and compiled it on my mac.
http://potrace.sourceforge.net/
potrace wants pnm files. no problem. imagemagick is an awesome utility for doing command line image manipulation.
http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php
i fed it some test frames.
two problems.
1) potrace doesn't handle color. it turns out inkscape does some excellent magic under the hood to work around this. this is not a show stopper.
2) potrace doesn't do centerline tracing. bzzzzt!
back to the magnetic abyss.
google suggests autotrace. it's old and free, but the source is still floating around.
http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/
i untar, make, make install it, and spend some time working out the syntax.
it looks promising and inkscape has no problems opening my test svg.
i raised one eyebrow and had some alchemist coffee.
i rendered a lot of blobby sphere animation frames.
and wrote a oneliner to batch the conversion:
cshort$ ls -1 *jpg | awk -F".jpg" '{print "convert "$1".jpg "$1".pbm; autotrace --centerline --output-format svg "$1".pbm > "$1".svg"}' > batch.sh
cshort$ head -5 batch.sh
convert frame-000000.jpg frame-000000.pbm; autotrace --centerline --output-format svg frame-000000.pbm > frame-000000.svg
convert frame-000001.jpg frame-000001.pbm; autotrace --centerline --output-format svg frame-000001.pbm > frame-000001.svg
convert frame-000002.jpg frame-000002.pbm; autotrace --centerline --output-format svg frame-000002.pbm > frame-000002.svg
convert frame-000003.jpg frame-000003.pbm; autotrace --centerline --output-format svg frame-000003.pbm > frame-000003.svg
convert frame-000004.jpg frame-000004.pbm; autotrace --centerline --output-format svg frame-000004.pbm > frame-000004.svg
two minutes later and i had 1080 svg frames.
i opened up the directory in ILD SOS and exported the svgs into a single ILDA animation.
this is a baby step. but very satisfying.