openSourceVFX.org » ruby

Earth

Philippe Leprince — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:18:27 +0000

Earth allows you to find files across a large network of machines and track disk usage in real time. It consists of a daemon that indexes filesystems in real time and reports all the changes back to a central database. This can then be queried through a simple, yet powerful, web interface. Think of it like Spotlight or Beagle but operating system independent with a central database for multiple machines with a web application that allows novel ways of exploring your data.

Earth is initially focused on managing the explosion of data that occurs in digital visual effects work.

Project Page: http://open.rsp.com.au/projects/earth
Language: Ruby
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X, etc
License: The GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2
Sponsor: Rising Sun Pictures

tracksperanto

Philippe Leprince — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 10:19:15 +0000

Camera tracking needs precise, hand-tailored 2D tracks. The promise of automatic 2D tracking is grand, but often fails expectations — mainly because auto-tracking algorithms cannot reliably link points which disappear or get obscured. For many shots 2D tracking by hand is a better option (it also allows you to speed up the solve by using less features). However, the solve also depends of the algorithm and it’s always beneficial to try the solve in all the matchmoving software available. Solving with the same features also gives a good comparison between different camera solving engines.

Tracksperanto allows you to track once in a program of your choice and then export the resulting features to all suppoorted 3D solving apps. Once there, it’s a 15 minute job to configure the camera and see if the solve comes out well or not. This method tends to yield very good results since you track at least one of the many 3D solvers on the market will give a correct computation.

Tracksperanto assists in translating 2D tracks between many formats so that you can move your 2D tracks from one application into all of the others, and the translation is multidirectional – most of the formats are supported both for reading and writing.

Format support

The following formats are supported, both for reading and writing:

Nuke scripts
Shake tracker export (many trackers in one file), also supported by 2d3d Boujou
SynthEyes tracker export
PFTrack .2dt tracker (both for PFTrack 4 and 5)
MatchMover Pro .rz2 files
3DEqualizer V4 and V3 curve exports
MayaLive exports

The following formats are supported for reading only

Flame/Smoke .stabilizer file (also exported by Combustion)
Shake script file

For all formats that record the tracker correlation (how sure the algorithm was about the precision of this particular keyframe) the correlation data gets translated as well

Intermediate processing

Tracksperanto can assist in transforming the tracks in various ways, namely

Slip all the tracked keyframes a number of frames forwards or backwards
Scale your tracks proportionally or non proportionally, or to a specific pixel size (track on proxies, apply to 2K! – or the other way around)
Prefix tracker names
and some more…

Home Page: http://guerilla-di.org/tracksperanto/
Project Page: http://github.com/guerilla-di/tracksperanto
Language: pure ruby (no compilation required)
Platform: Windows, OSX, Linux
License: MIT

depix

Philippe Leprince — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:28:22 +0000

Film scans and images are usualy shoved about in DPX files. These files embed a massive amount of metadata which can be used to automatically catalog and search in big file collections (and searching is essential since a complete feature film will run well into tens of thousands of files). Reading this metadata can easily help with cumbersome tasks like sorting DPX files per reel/timecode, resolution, selective copying/processing and such daily tasks.

Additionally, depix supports editing of DPX metadata without the need to copy the file over (since files can be big). The metadata gets modified in-place without any copy operations, which is especially helpful when operating across a network.

Home Page: http://guerilla-di.org/depix/
Language: ruby
Platform: Windows, OS X, Linux
License: MIT

timecode

Philippe Leprince — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 21:09:01 +0000

Working with timecodes is essential for any post workflow. We use our own timecode library which records timecode as two values (frames per second in float and the number of frames from zero as an integer). The Timecode class

does easy conversions (24 to 25 etc)
is sortable and comparable
can be used with ranges and link lists
supports calculations like multiplication, subtraction and division (timecode calculators galore!)
outputs itself in different formats – floating seconds with comma and dot, bit-packed SMPTE
parses user-friendly input patterns like “000100” and “10h 10s 10f”
is super easy to subclass and serialize

Home Page: http://guerilla-di.org/timecode/
Language: Pure Ruby (no compilation required)
Platform: Windows, OS X, Linux
License: MIT

edl

Philippe Leprince — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 21:05:46 +0000

The library assists in parsing EDL files in CMX 3600 format. You can use it to generate capture lists, inspect needed video segments for the assembled program and display edit timelines. Together with the depix module you could write your own “blind” conform utility in about 10 minutes, no joke.

Home Page: http://guerilla-di.org/edl/
Language: Pure Ruby (no compilation required)
Platform: Window, OS X, Linux
License: MIT

Scala Migrations

Philippe Leprince — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 10:42:39 +0000

Scala Migrations is a library to manage upgrades and rollbacks to database schemas. Migrations allow a source control system to manage together the database schema and the code using the schema. It is designed to allow multiple developers working on a project with a database backend to design schema modifications independently, apply the migrations to their local database for debugging and when complete, check them into a source control system to manage as one manages normal source code. Other developers then check out the new migrations and apply them to their local database. Finally, the migrations are used to migrate the production databases to the latest schema version.

The package is based off Ruby on Rails Migrations and in fact shares the exact same schema_migrations table to manage the list of installed migrations. The Scala Migrations library is written in Scala and makes use of the clean Scala language to write easy to understand migrations, which are also written in Scala. Scala Migrations provides a database abstraction layer that allows migrations to target any supported database vendor.

Home Page: http://opensource.imageworks.com
Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/scala-migrations/
Language: Scala
Platform: All
License: New BSD License
Sponsor: Sony Imageworks