A new video has been released by Omashay. Here is Goodnight, on which I did the slow-motion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAKmRTV7Lek

The video is based on a series of 70 sketches Tomasito’s made for a college project:

He wanted to explore the possibilities of reusing them for a music video. I had the perfect secret weapon for this kind of job: slowmoVideo, an open-source clone of Twixtor.

In fact I tried to use that software 14 months ago, but never went as far as producing something. First I realized I had no nVidia GPU at hand. So I rented a GPU Quadruple Extra Large EC2 instance (cg1.4xlarge) from Amazon’s cloud. It cost me $4.70 (without VAT) for 3 hours. But I failed to compiles slowmoVideo.

I forgot about it until recently, when I learned it no longer required a GPU to compute the optical flow. And last month I found a way to compile slowmoVideo on Ubuntu 12.10.

Now it’s time to prepare my keyframes. I batch-resized all original drawings to 1080p with a white background. This was done in one command line thanks to ImageMagick:

$ convert -resize 1920x1080 -background white -gravity center -extent 1920x1080 ./keyframes/* pict%04d.png

Then I applied a paper texture to add some grain:

$ find ./ -iname "pict*.png" -exec composite -gravity center -compose Multiply ./paper-texture.png "{}" "{}"-texturized.png \;

The series of images were imported in slowmoVideo, and I created a 4 minutes linear ultra-slowmotion with the default parameters.

Finally, the raw rendering was assembled in Kdenlive with Goodnight’s audio track and title cards to produce the result that is now available on YouTube.