Time for a Droste Effect demo in AE

Carl Larsen of Creative Cow has a video demonstration of the recursive Droste Effect, mentioned here in several posts in the last 3 months (embedded below).

Larsen's using the Pixel Bender filter for Photoshop and After Effects ported by subblue (Tom Beddard). The demo is worth seeing, just stay off the feed lot.

Image processing geekery

Just as subblue (Tom Beddard) ported over the Mathmap Droste Effect filter to Adobe's Pixel Bender Toolkit, maybe we'll benefit from other cross pollinations. According to Chris Parish, Pixel Bender is similar to Apple's Core Image (and so too is Conduit similar to Quartz Composer), and there's parallels not just to Processing, but to Mathmap and Mathematica.

Mathematica 7 added a suite of image processing and video functions to its visualization tools, which are discussed in the blog post The Incredible Convenience of Mathematica Image Processing, and in an introductory screencast and a specific screencast on image processing. Popular items like a lenticular 3D Periodic Table is just the tip of the iceberg -- Slashdot calls it the most expensive clone of Photoshop ever.

Also interesting is The MathMap Composer. MathMap is "a very generic image processing tool in the form of a GIMP plug-in (it can also be used as a command-line tool, though). This newest release sports a very exciting new feature, called “MathMap Composer”, which is similar in spirit to Quartz Composer for MacOS X, or, to pick a more well-known product, Yahoo! Pipes." Here’s a screencast presentation:

Pre-Pixel Bender Droste effect music video

The video done below could now be done easier with the free Droste Effect Pixel Bender filter that works in AE CS4. The "Droste Effect" features recursive images (like feedback) like the cover art of Ummagumma by Pink Floyd.




Adland has the story behind OneInThree's creation of a "Droste effect" video for the band "Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants" (shown below):

"Mathmap was designed to apply the effect to single images so OneInThree developed a proprietary method to be able to run batches of images through the program, unfortunately the batch limit was 40 frames before the application would crash... After 1080 computer hours, over 400 crashes and 2 terabytes of data, spread across 7 hard drives, the final compositing could be done. The 'Drosted' images were brought into After Effects, re-conformed and animated to zoom in time to the beat. The transitions were then hand animated and the stills added into the mix before OneInThree headed back to The Mill, for a DCP and sound lay."

Also, Frank Beltrán has posted the Making of Droste Videoclip "Clap your brains off," which was also done by hand.

free 'Droste Effect' Pixel Bender filter

subblue (Tom Beddard) just ported over the Mathmap v10 Droste Effect filter to Adobe's Pixel Bender Toolkit (see also subblue's flickr page). The filters can be used in After Effects and Photoshop CS4 (and in some cases Flash 10):

"The real creative possibilities open up with After Effects when animating the parameters with a video input! You can download the script here where there are also installation instructions and a quick start guide."

As noted earlier, there are animations available (not from AE) at Leiden University's Escher and the Droste effect; see the frames below from an animation from A logarithmic image transformation by Jos Leys.

Conduit for Flash Pixel Bender

Lacquer has extended their Conduit compositing plug-in for After Effects and Photoshop to Pixel Bender (via). Conduit for Flash Pixel Bender is in beta but you can buy in now; see the samples. Training movies and more about Conduit can be found at DV Garage; previous notes on Pixel Bender are here.

Update: This version probably will only export .PBJ (Pixel Bender Bytecode) files for Flash, not .PBK (Pixel Bender Kernels) and .PBG (Pixel Bender Graphs, networks of kernels), which are supposed to be the only formats supported in After Effects CS4 and the forthcoming Photoshop Pixel Bender filter extension.

Update 2: There are similar products that work with FxPlug technology on Mac OS X and allow modifciation and filter export of work done in the node-based Apple Quartz Composer. For example, FxFactory Pro allows you to create visual effects plug-ins starting from Quartz compositions. Previous notes here also mentioned Effect Builder AE from Pixlock and QC Integration FX.

Update 3: a Pixel Bender filter based on the ‘Droste effect’ (via) might be fun. There's actual animations available at Leiden University's Escher and the Droste effect; see the frames below from an animation from A logarithmic image transformation by Jos Leys.

Update 4: and of course a Pixel Bender did come 6 weeks later; see free 'Droste Effect' Pixel Bender filter.