Book Image

Mastering openFrameworks: Creative Coding Demystified

By : Denis Perevalov
Book Image

Mastering openFrameworks: Creative Coding Demystified

By: Denis Perevalov

Overview of this book

openFrameworks is a powerful programming toolkit and library designed to assist the creative process through simplicity and intuitiveness. It's a very handy software library written in C++ to reduce the software development process, helping you to kick-start creative coding. With the help of C++ and shaders support, openFrameworks allows for the processing of all kinds of media information with your custom-developed algorithms at the lowest possible level, with the fastest speed. "Mastering openFrameworks: Creative Coding Demystified" will introduce you to a world of creative coding projects, including interactive installations, audio-visual, and sound art projects. You will learn how to make your own projects using openFrameworks. This book focuses on low-level data processing, which allows you to create really unique and cutting-edge installations and projects. "Mastering openFrameworks: Creative Coding Demystified" provides a complete introduction to openFrameworks, including installation, core capabilities, and addons. Advanced topics like shaders, computer vision, and depth cameras are also covered. We start off by discussing the basic topics such as image and video loading, rendering and processing, playing sound samples, and synthesizing new sounds. We then move on to cover 3D graphics, computer vision, and depth cameras. You will also learn a number of advanced topics such as video mapping, interactive floors and walls, video morphing, networking, and using geometry shaders. You will learn everything you need to know in order to create your own projects; create projects of all levels, ranging from simple creative-code experiments, to big interactive systems consisting of a number of computers, depth cameras, and projectors.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Mastering openFrameworks: Creative Coding Demystified
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Video basics


Video is the most usable container for dynamic media today. It consists of a number of frames—moving images and soundtrack—all encapsulated in a single file. In principle, each video can be represented by a sequence of separate image files for each frame and audio files for soundtracks. But using a single file is often more comfortable.

Tip

The big advantage of using a single video file is that modern video codecs can significantly reduce the video's file size compared to the size of image sequence plus the soundtrack file sizes. Also, decoding video can be made easier using GPU instead of CPU. These two reasons give a possibility to play HD videos smoothly and at high framerates with openFrameworks. Nevertheless, in Using image sequence section, we will see when using an image sequence is more suitable than using a single video file.

The best known file formats for video are AVI, MP4, and MOV. All these formats are supported in openFrameworks, but in general it is preferable to...