Document Frames
Films are sequences of images. Moved before our eyes at a fast enough rate, it appears as if something is in motion. Digital films, while somewhat erasing the distinction between "frames" as a result various compression techniques, still use the concept in their construction and execution.
The PDF format can draw its lineage from Postscript, a page description language developed in the late 1970s that in part helped create the field of desktop publishing. While PDF documents can consist of text, vector, and raster graphis, we can think of them instead as a series of images, especially where scanned documents are concerned. Optical character recognition (the automatic determination of text from an image of text) on a scanned textual document muddies this characterization somewhat, but a number of software packages exist that will extract pages from a PDF document as images.
So, if we can create a series of images from a PDF document, can we then create a series of moving images from these pages? The answer is of course yes. We have created a series of video pieces that demonstrate this potential form of distribution. The following code can be used to generate your own videos within a standard Linux distribution:
convert -verbose -quantize YUV -interlace none -density 100 -quality 80 filename.pdf filename_%03d.png
for i in $(ls filename_*.png);
do
convert -rotate 90 -resize 720x480\! $i resized_$i;
done
ffmpeg -r 1 -vb 2048k -i resized_filename_%03d.png filename.ogv
The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism from Editor, JJPS on Vimeo.
Hatred of Democracy from Editor, JJPS on Vimeo.
The coloured "artefacts" are a result of the compression techniques mentioned above, an intriguing finding that lends the video its own particular character.
Journal of Journal Performance Studies is a 2009 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.
Back to turbulence.