Black cat, alley

Synthetic ··· frames ···

A projected 3D scene: every frame of a black cat crossing a night alley is kept at once as a trail of points, with the present frame highlighted. The scene is synthetic.

Clock0923 E7

00:00:00

Camera0923 E8

Frame ···

Layers0923 E9

Time
Show

Stock0923 F1

Colors
00:00:00 HOLD 0.00×

Splice0923 SP

Pull the strip below through the gate. Pull it back and the edge floods with light.

This card leaves a trail if you drag it.

4D.OS 1.00923 00

Threading film…

0%

Fourteen seconds. Every frame, at once.

A strip of film already holds every moment of a shot, side by side. This desktop threads a reconstruction in space and time the same way: the strip is the clock, the gate is now, and nothing that happened is thrown away.

Reel 1 Two dimensions, plus time

A glider from Conway’s Game of Life. One generation is a flat grid; stack the generations like frames on a strip and the glider becomes a staircase you can walk around.

Reel 2 From film to space

  1. Shoot

    An ordinary video from one moving camera.

  2. Develop

    Each frame is developed into its own cloud of 3D points, with the camera that saw it.

  3. Project

    Every developed frame is left where and when it happened. Nothing is merged.

Lab note The subject on this strip is synthetic: a low-poly cat by J-Toastie (CC-BY 3.0), animated by us and sampled into points frame by frame, standing in for a real reconstruction.

Reel 3 Scroll is time

Scroll down to run the strip forward. Scroll up and it rewinds through the gate.

Reel 4 Lab report

Frames
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Running time
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Frame rate
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Moving points
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Still points
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Can weight
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Measured from the strip currently threaded, not written by hand.

Reel 5 On the shelf

Reel 6 Questions

Is this a video?

No. It is a scene of points drawn live in your browser. Every frame of the original motion is kept, so the whole shot can be seen at once and pulled through in either direction.

Why does it look like film stock?

The picture is rendered at a fraction of your screen’s resolution and reduced to a sixteen-color stock with ordered dithering, live, every frame. Switch the stock to Millions to see the scene underneath.

Is the cat real?

Not yet. This strip uses a synthetic subject so the desktop can be built and measured before real captures exist.

What do the keys do?

Space holds or resumes. J rewinds, K holds, L plays forward; press J or L again to go faster. The arrow keys step one frame.