Playing MovieIn TOPs in Sequence

[Jacob]

I was goofing around with Touch a bit over the Holidays and I tried doings something I thought would be fairly simple. I created several short video clips and then tied to play them back in sequence. The videos were trimmed to about 100 frames or so, but for some reason the Sequence TOP would only play about half of each clip. I tried many different options on the Movie In TOP but it didn't seem to help, and the Sequence TOP doesn't really have any options to mess with. Is there a some kind of RAM limitation to the Sequence TOP?

Thanks,
Jacob

[malcolm]

Hey, the Sequence TOP is actually a relic back from when we started TOPs, it shouldn't even be there anymore. I'll remove it.
We're going to add a component to the palette that does this, not sure when though.

The correct way to do this now is with a Switch TOP and some scripting (or CHOP)s.

[Jacob]

Good to know. I'll give the Switch a try and see if I can get it working.

Thanks,
Jacob

[quine]

I'm looking to do something similar. Currently I have 3 movieIn TOP's piping into a switch TOP which updates a phong MAT's colour map... I can manually change movies by sliding the switch's Index slider but would like to automate this.

What CHOP's should I start with?

cq

[ben]

I would start with an Info CHOP on each of the movies. This will give you current frame (index) and movie length in CHOP channels. You could take these 2 channels and subtract length-index, when this gets to 0 then you make an event to switch movies and start playing the second movie. The switch event could be a script in a DAT or it could be done in CHOPs.

[malcolm]

One note, you'll likely want to turn on the 'Passive' flag for the Info CHOP, otherwise you'll get a cook loop (info chop->moviein->switch->someother chops->info chop)

[quine]

Alright, I've got info CHOP's linked to each movie and am seeing data in the CHOP's.

I am trying to get my head around starting a script in a text DAT but am a little lost. (design vs. coding background). I am familiar with editing scripts and understanding things to a certain level but i am scratching my head with how to start.

Are there any reference scripts that might show something similar to what I want to do? Play one movie, transition (cross dissolve?) to next movie when 1st is almost finished, then on to the third... movies are attached to a switch which acts as colour map for a phong.

many thanks,
quine