Lina Maria Giraldo's Blog

 

For my midterm, I wanted to combine live video feed from a US/Mexico border camera with live text feeds from the stock exchange. Unfortunately, the site I found “American Border Patrol” only has PC software and even then, they had restrictions on membership. I then decided to use recorded footage they had available.

 

The video is black and white and is 1 min 10 sec long. First of all, it didn’t want to work because it was a window media player so I had to open it on the pc and exported it as a quick time.  After, I exported to FCP and changed the size to 640 by 480.   After this, the video is working and in the size I want. I decided to load it. It is having a lot of trouble sometimes. It locks up processing once in a while and I have to close and reopen again. The size of the video is 195 megabytes. I’ve been recommended to lower its resolution. I’ve been reluctant to do it, because I don’t want to loose quality. So far it’s been a problem, so I have to take a decision soon or at least have two versions of it .

 

The next problem was the Data text files from the stock. I was able to pull some values and get some static quotes, but found it very difficult to obtain live feeds. I used a static TXT file for development. Here, I was able to load the information from yahoo stock exchange but I wasn’t able to display the text on top of the video so I decide it to use my example of a string that use with the Gutenberg text using it with an array of strings.

 

 

int[] data;

void setup() {

  size(200,200);

 // The text from the file is loaded into an array.

 String[] lines = loadStrings (“quotes-1.txt”);

 println(“there are “+ lines.length+” lines”);

 for(int i=0; i<lines.length; i++){

   println(lines[i]);

 }

 //String[] stuff = loadStrings(“data.txt”);

  // This array has one element because the file only has one line.

  // Convert String into an array of integers using ‘,’ as a delimiter

  //data = int(split(stuff[0], ‘,’ ));

}

void draw() {

  background(255);

  stroke(0);

    /*

  for (int i = 0; i < data.length; i ++ ) {

    // The array of ints is used to set the color and height of each rectangle.

    //fill(data[i]);

    //rect(i*20,0,20,data[i]);

  }

  */

}

 

 

I already combined the video with the text. So far, it’s working smooth and I like the result of the grid combine with the video and the text. I started with the example of video text mirror and made it work with the existing video and data. This is running and working so far but I need to create more interactivity in my project , so I decide it to move the text to the right Then came the big challenge: How to move the letters  too! After many, many, many tries I finally figured the way was to move the variable that controlled the text up every time the draw cycle passed. I made another counter and it worked, except that it moved so fast, it blurred all the letters…

 

The solution was to create a micro counter that increased very little every time the draw cycle ran. This worked fine! Except when it crashed after it grew larger than the string… So I put an “if” to control this.  

 

All was well, except the data. I didn’t like the static data and I thought it looked too disorganized. I changed the idea a bit and used the Bill of Rights.  this is my code for this:

 

 String url = “http://itp.nyu.edu/proxy/proxy.php?url=http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext90/bill11h.htm”;

  String[] rawtext = loadStrings(url);

  // Join the big array together as one long string

 String chars = join(rawtext, “” );

 

 

And finally, the moment we have all been waiting for! Without further delays, the code that worked:

 

 

// 10/19/08

// Midterm

// www.linamariagiraldo.com

 

import processing.video.*;

 

// Size of each cell in the grid, ratio of window size to video size

int videoScale =8;

 

// Number of columns and rows in our system

int cols, rows;

int start = 0;

 

// Variable to hold onto capture object

Movie movie;

 

//Determine initial value of micro counter

 float micro = start;

 

 

// The source text used in the mosaic pattern.

// String chars = “123456789” ;

 

// Load text into an array of strings

  //String url = “http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext90/bill11.txt”;

    //String url = “http://itp.nyu.edu/proxy/proxy.php?url=http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext90/bill11.txt”;

    String url = “http://itp.nyu.edu/proxy/proxy.php?url=http://www.linamariagiraldo.com/itp/bor.txt”;

    //String url = “http://www.linamariagiraldo.com/itp/bor.txt”;

  String[] rawtext = loadStrings(url);

  // Join the big array together as one long string

 String chars = join(rawtext, “” );

 

PFont f;

 

void setup() {

  size(640,480);

  // Set up columns and rows

  cols = width/videoScale;

  rows = height/videoScale;

  movie = new Movie(this, “border5.mov”);

  movie.loop();

  // Load the font

 f = loadFont(“myfont.vlw”);

}

 

// Read new frames from movie

void movieEvent(Movie movie) {

  movie.read();

}

 

void draw() {

    background(0);

 

   if (mousePressed) {

image(movie,0,0);  

      }

 

    else{

  movie.loadPixels();

 

  // Use a variable to count through chars in String

 

 int charcount = int (micro);

  //int charcount = 0;

  // Begin loop for rows

  for (int j = 0; j < rows; j ++ ) {

    // Begin loop for columns

    for (int i = 0; i < cols; i ++ ) {

     

      // Where are we, pixel-wise?

      int x = i*videoScale;

      int y = j*videoScale;

      

      // Looking up the appropriate color in the pixel array

      color c = movie.get(x,y);

      // Displaying an individual character from the String instead of a rectangle

      textFont(f);

      fill(c);

     

      // One character from the source text is displayed colored accordingly to the pixel location.

      // A counter variable charcount is used to walk through the source String one character at a time.

 // this is affected by the microcounter so it is constantly increasing

      text(chars.charAt(charcount),x,y);

     

      // Go on to the next character

      charcount = (charcount + 1) % chars.length();

      

    }

  }

}

// procedure to increase the micro counter

println (micro + ” of”);

println (chars.length() + ” total”);

if (micro < chars.length() – 1) {

micro=micro+0.05;

}

else {

  micro = start;

}

}