Neat. After playing Out of this World a long time ago, I was wondering if it was viable to compress video data using polygons annotated image block overlays in the high-frequency/high-error areas. Looks like I might've been onto something, since it seems like polys alone are pretty good at capturing the image.
This has been done a very long time ago when the demo group Spaceballs released "9 fingers" on Amiga, where a number of video sequences were reproduced entirely in polygons. There were artifacts but the effect was impressive at that time, when MPEG-1 decompression was impossible on such low-power machines. You can check the effect on youtube. I do not know what tools they used to compress the video into polygons, though.
"As far as I remember, we used a S-VHS camcorder and replayed the video with a VHS-player capable of showing the video one frame at the time with a certain degree of "stableness". Then we digitized the frame with a normal digitizer (DigiView?). Custom software were then used to "vectorize" the images. But all this is a little hazy. It's been "a few" years since I called myself Dark Helmet..."
I would not be surprised if the algorithm used to compress the video into polygons was called "tracing it by hand". I'm pretty sure I've read that was the algorithm used for their earlier video-focused demo "State of the Art".
Thanks for your answer - very interesting. You must have owned an Amiga if you know this matter in so great details :)
I did not know that for "state of the art" they drew the vectors by hand. Which is basically what Eric Chahi did for Another World back then, using rotoscoping. I am assuming that the technique they used for "9 fingers" is different though. They are WAY more vectors in 9 fingers than in State of the Art, and that would take a huge amount of time to reproduce them on screen. I am pretty sure they found a smarter way to do it (you can guess this from the fact that the video reproduction in vectors is almost perfect in 9 fingers, while in state of the art the animation is sometimes jerky and they use shadows/blur/changing background to hide the imperfections).
The demoscene is/was amazing. One downside of everything going through browsers is that people have lost the ability to talk directly to the metal - it's what separated the men from the boys. Some of the Commodore 64 demos are absolutely incredible when you consider how few resources they have available. I think I'll be spending a few hours watching these Amiga demos...
Yeah, the demoscene has always been full of surprises, especially on low-end hardware. About those amiga demos, they run fine with Amiga Emulators such as WinUAE, so you can check them out for yourself fairly easily.
