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#1 2007-05-24 00:01:11

Hammination
Scratcher
Registered: 2007-05-17
Posts: 10

Sending a Performance to TV

Could a performance be recorded to video?  If so, what resolution would the video be?

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#2 2007-05-24 18:55:10

andresmh
Scratch Team at MIT
Registered: 2007-03-05
Posts: 1000+

Re: Sending a Performance to TV

You can do a screen capture of your Scratch project just like from any other application. If you are on Windows, I would recommend Camtasia. It exports into Flash and several video formats.

I assume you are aware that Scratch is more than just animations. A lot of people use input from mouse or keyboard, or other sources of input which cannot be captured on a video. I would be curious to know what you do with Scratch.

Thanks for Scratching!  smile


Andres Monroy-Hernandez | Scratch Team at the MIT Media Lab
on identi.ca and  twitter

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#3 2007-05-25 00:32:01

Hammination
Scratcher
Registered: 2007-05-17
Posts: 10

Re: Sending a Performance to TV

I am an traditional animator who now animates in Flash on a Mac.  What fascinated me when I saw the first video game many years ago was that you could interactiviely control animation.  In recent years I had an Amiga and there was a program from Weemsware that allowed you to assign single pictures to different parts of a joystick up to eight.  In my animated feature THE DREAM HAT (done primarily on the Amiga, with a small percentage finished in Flash on the Mac) a couple dialogue scenes were accomplished by having the character talk by moving the joystick.  The Amiga allowed you to send whatever was on the computer including animation directly to video.

I would like to create electronic puppets.  It would be great to build the animation parts you need beforehand, just like you would for a videogame, but use them for dialogue scenes in animation.  It would in essence be live animation.  If you were making a TV show where you reused animation, you could pump out a lot of animation by recording the dialogue scenes "live" as electronic puppets.

If there were a "record" command in Scratch so you could play back what you had performed, than you could send it out as a movie.

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#4 2007-05-25 07:51:35

kevin_karplus
Scratcher
Registered: 2007-04-27
Posts: 1000+

Re: Sending a Performance to TV

This feature could be provided with a lot less memory than a full video recording by providing a "journal" feature that records every interaction with a timestamp. Perhaps each broadcast and move would need to be recorded with a timestamp also.  It would also have to record every number that comes out of the random number generator each time it is called, so that exactly the same sequence can be repeated.

Playing back the journal should repeat the same movie (as long as the playback machine was fast enough---you may not be able to duplicate the actions of a fast machine on a slow one).

Of course, there *is* a lot of demand for animated movie clips, so having an easy way to record the action on the scratch screen as a movie would be a nice feature, though I expect that squeak is not fast enough for that to be feasible.

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#5 2007-05-26 00:44:41

mungojelly
Scratcher
Registered: 2007-05-19
Posts: 35

Re: Sending a Performance to TV

Scratch puppets is an awesome idea!  There's 41 keys it knows plus the mouse, so you could have a whole lot of control-- moving it with the mouse, while giving it a handful of expressions on the keyboard with the other hand.

<3

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#6 2007-05-26 13:39:54

kevin_karplus
Scratcher
Registered: 2007-04-27
Posts: 1000+

Re: Sending a Performance to TV

Control by keyboard could be a problem, as you may not have "chord" control---most keyboard interfaces will only report one key down at a time (other than shift and control keys, which scratch provides no access to).  Auto-repeat keys can also mess up the semantics of the key interface.

It would be nice if the scratch documentation was clearer about how the program implementation handles keyboard interfaces.

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