A Processing sketch and set of scripts to produce artwork for the Boston Convention Center's 7-screen marquee

This system was designed to work on Linux, where there are plenty of useful command-line tools to assist in the generation, manipulation, and assembly of images and videos. Contributions for other operating systems are welcome.

1. Add your own code to the setup() and draw() routines. Use the useScreen variable to change what's drawn to each screen.

2. Set the useScreen variable to the desired screen, maxFrames to the number of frames to render, and set record to true.

3. Run the program. It will generate the requested number of frames and write them to this directory.

4. Run the program with record = true for the other two screens.

5. For the following sequence of Perl scripts, you will need the netpbm package installed. Some of the scripts accept command-line arguments. The first two arguments are the indexes for first and last frames to be processed. The below examples are written for a 30-second, 899-frame sequence.

    ./assemble.pl 1 899
   

6. The next one takes a block from the lower right image and creates data for the pillar lights.

    ./makelights.pl 1 899
   

7. These last two will apply the fade in from black and the fade out to black, replacing the original frames. The arguments are the first and last frames to be changed.

    ./fadefromblack.pl 1 30
    ./fadetoblack.pl 849 899
   

8. Encode the movie. You'll need the mencoder package.

    mencoder "mf://frame_????.png" -mf w=1920:h=1080:type=png:fps=30 -o video_1080p30.mov -sws 9 -of lavf -lavfopts format=mov -nosub -vf softskip,harddup -nosound -ovc x264 -x264encopts bitrate=15000:vbv_maxrate=20000:vbv_bufsize=2000:nointerlaced:force_cfr:frameref=3:mixed_refs:bframes=1:b_adapt=2:weightp=1:direct_pred=auto:aq_mode=1:me=umh:me_range=16:subq=6:mbtree:psy_rd=0.8,0.2:chroma_me:trellis=1:nocabac:deblock:partitions=p8x8,b8x8,i8x8,i4x4:nofast_pskip:nodct_decimate:threads=auto:ssim:psnr:keyint=300:keyint_min=30:level_idc=30:global_header
   

9. Finally, upload the image to the server. You'll need Microsoft Silverlight to do that. You're right, that is backwards.

(c) 2015 Mark J. Stock