Gizmodo
This is what you get when you capture 69,550 full resolution frames from the six Star Wars movies and combine them with a version of DaVinci's Last Supper on a PC with mosaic-making software and a custom matlab-based algorithm. The 262-megapixel mosaic (24,168 x 10,864 pixels) took two weeks to complete, including 30 hours of computing power and manual retouching for the final version. Avinash Arora, the guy who did it, tells us about the process.
Jesús Díaz: What materials did you use for creating this huge thing?
Avinash Arora: The 69,550-image collection I made is from all the movies. Originally I extracted EVERY image using vlc's image output plug-in from Episode IV, and used a photoshop programmed command to delete every 19 frames, and save the 20th. Only after that did I discover AndreaMosaic could do that for me, which saved me a ton of time in the other five movies. As the base, I used Eric Deschamps' Star Wars Last Supper painting done for Giant Magazine.
JD: What kind of computer did you use to do this?
AA: An Asus M2N SLI motherboard with AMD 5400+ X2, eVGA nVidia Geforce 8800GTS 640MB, and 2GB DDR2 Corsair XMS memory.
JD: What about the software?
AA: The original software I used is AndreaMosaic, but I found that the algorithm wasn't really producing the results I wanted. I ended up tinkering with the settings and producing dozens of sample mosaics to view, and I did some research and found out how it worked.
JD: Did you get what wanted at the end? What did you do to improve the quality?
AA: I created my own slightly modified algorithm to include pathlines of the strongest "importance" (or rather color distinction, so I could find pictures that followed the image's contours for every detail) I got more satisfying results. I kept tinkering with this one and made six full-size mosaics, until I finally settled on the last one...
JD: And that was that?
AA: No, I went to work on it by hand after that. I replaced at least a thousand images by hand that looked like they were out of place (my programming isn't perfect), and did some color corrections on others. The entire thing was done when I took sections and pieces from the mosaics I made with AndreaMosaic, my own matlab-based algorithm, and the original image I drew inspiration from, and put it all together in Photoshop (I also discovered that .psd files have a maximum size of 2GB, but luckily .raw files do not.)
JD: How long did it take you, then?
AA: Each movie's image extraction process took about an hour, that was the easy part. Each sample mosaic I made for testing took about 90 minutes. Each full mosaic I made took about 6-8 hours. Once I had the final mosaic and went to work, I'd say I put about 25-30 hours of work into touching up by hand.
The process (not including extracting the images from the movies) took me about two weeks from the time I made the first full mosaic, about a dozen samples, second full mosaic, dozen samples, etc.
During the two weeks I missed all but about two classes, and the day I finished I took an exam for a class I forgot I had...
JD: Geezuss...
AA: Don't worry, I still did well. :-)
JD: How big is the thing?
AA: Each image was about 640x272, but when placed into the mosaic they were shrunken down to 120 pixel wide. Each image is a full-quality jpeg, and they're cut up into folders (because my computer doesn't take too kindly to one folder with 69,550 files in it).
The final resolution of the image 24,168 x 10,864 pixels... 262 megapixels. Unfortunately I couldn't print it at the epic level I wanted to, which would have been a 5x11' composite, not a 3x6', and that would have been a 712-megapixel image. The guy who prints them says his computer is incapable of opening an image that large (which flattened would have been about 3GB... and uncompressed almost 40GB.) [Avinator]
Comments
notice it wasn't done on a mac - cos it involved real work.
@flyboy: PC FTW
It's unbelievable the extent to which Star Wars geeks will go. The movie was not that great, buddy.....
impressive
Whether the movies were great or not, that is a fantastic piece of work.
... most impressive.
@flyboy: That's the stupidest thing I ever read.
@flyboy:
True because a Mac would have done it in half the time at twice the resolution. So not as much work good call.
Copyright infringement! RUN!!!!!
want
His system is identical to mine! Except i have a 5200+ and a 6800GTS
One of you at this table is going to betray me...Oh wait...my thoughts just betrayed me!
anything with samuel L jackson in it is ok in my book
I did the same thing once, but I didn't think anyone would care. So I just scrapped the whole thing.
A lot of work for... this.
If this were commercially available I would be one of many geeks in line to give up my coin.
is anybody else experiencing trouble seeing the comments. words are inside the left border, which is black, so the type is almost unreadable on the left side
At the beginning of the period the ancients called the 21st century, the so-called Jedi sect began its rise to power. The previously innocuous subculture known as the Basement Dwellers began to exploit its hold upon nascent technologies for purposes other than baseless self-promotion and compulsive masturbation.
Unified by their devotion to the Skywalker lineage, the Jedi sect quickly crushed their rivals (Trekkies, LOTR Freaks, FanFic authors of all kinds, and even the elusive LARPers) in the much-documented WWW Flame War of 2010. Emboldened by their success, the Jedi sect moved on to dominate mainstream society by means of DOS attacks, identity theft, and unrelenting hissie fits.
The Jedi sect's reign was, of course, short-lived. Fractured by infighting over which would be the official OS of the new world order, the sect endured a long and painful demise. During the struggle, power changed hands many times until, as civilization was all but certain to fall into a new dark age, our Fathers of the Church of Amiga took up the fallen reins and redeemed us all.
Then, we killed all the penguins.
..and each of the individual Episode frames in the mosaic are made up of composite mosaics from screen grabs of Star Trek movies! trekkies FTW!
This could go on and on...
Just a thought but wasn't Vader the analogous Christ-child? Luke is actually Judas because he ruins Vader's life.
2 weeks and 30 days on a PC seems normal to me. Thats how long it normally takes to scan for PC viruses, right?. Anyway, montage is really nice, but not cutting edge design. A circa 2001 trick used by kodak for soccer mom advertising isn't what I call Mac material nowadays. PC YAWN
@mtopper: Same thing here. Been happening for a few days now.
@thesilentnight: I'd have to agree with this_
@flyboy: ...think what you want dude_
Anyway - first he needs to find someone to print that capable of at least the 3Gb File_ You never need to print something uncompressed at the 40Gbs - that's just a waste - you just have to compress it correctly_
Second - 120-pixel full quality JPGs are an oxy-moron_ JPG use as much compression as they can handle and throw out as much information as they can_ Therefore no such thing as a full quality JPG_ So his output versions no matter his setttings are going to be low quality_ He should have gone with TIF or as he mentioned putting everything into a RAW format - he should have gone with RAW straight off instead of converting from a JPG to a RAW_
Third - Using RAW instead of a Photoshop file is irrelevant_ He must be using Photoshop version 6 or 7 or something_ As CS introduced .psb file format which is Photoshop's Large Document Format_ This is capable of well over anything he would have needed for this project_ Secondly even if he was using an older version of Photoshop - the TIFF format is capable of 4GB capacities_
Fourth - his AMD 64-bit dual-core processor there gave him no significant advantage doing anything related to Photoshop as Photoshop is only 32-bit and does not recognize the added abilities of the processor he was using except in using a wider allocation space to take advantage of larger file sizes in the newer versions__ Further more the version of Windows Avinash was using either was 32-bit or 64-bit only_ In either case the 64-bit version again would not have given any advantage to the Photoshop usage and as well the 32-bit version of Windows merely would not have recognized the 64-bit processor and would have only cranked things out in a 32-bit mode_
So on all accounts [aside from the Matlab crunching - which there's no way to tell what he specifically used from the above article] - your boy did himself a disservice running things on a 64-bit Windows system_
Jesus - does Lucas know about this - as it is very impressive work.
@Geisrud: LOL!
.
I bet his parents that paid for him to go to college are proud he blew off 2 weeks of school to work on this....
on another note - it's pretty damned cool_
Way too much free time tho_
@mtopper: I don't know about all of that - but the black space along the left is there_ It reminds me of an older version of Gizmodo and also the comment/psoting buttons have been screwy for the past several days_ Seems again like they've reverted back to an older or maybe "default" version_
Namely the Quote and +/- buttons and I think there was one more that is missing now_
awesome-o!
I'm not sure about the black bar issue. I see everything just fine. Maybe a browser issue? I'm using FireFox.
@flyboy: HAHA funny part about that is that THIS IS JUST A SCREEN SAVER IN OS X. All Macs running Leopard can do this real time with your iPhoto or Aperture libraries right out of the box. Iditioc PC users spend 2 days doing something that's a real time screen saver in OS X.
Apple > System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver > Select a Photo Album > Display Style: Mosaic. DONE!
+ Watch video
@AndersonBMX: Apple FTW. AGAIN!
@flyboy: @AndersonBMX:
Uh oh......you don't want to be called "haters" now......HAHAHAH!
Haters, haters, haters, haters! HAHAHAHAH!
Actually, I am forced to use Macs fairly regularly and from my experience this would have been one of the very few times where I would probably want an apple.
Unless I'm manipulating graphics, video or other tangible media, the apples I use are fairly useless.
@Out2gtcha:
yeah - nut to manipulate this kind of image you have to drop say 15K on a Mac strong enough whereas your Xi Skulltrail 8 core can do it for around 5K.
Its just an example of someone doing real work using a PC for the compute per dollar factor so he gets it done faster.
most studios have similar situations - a bunch of Macs for fiddling and some strong boxes for the grunt stuff.
...
Goddamnit. Watch that Southpark Mac vs. PC video on youtube.
All computers suck. Cry about it.
I hate those multi-picture pictures. Mostly because people make it sound like it is a big deal. Really, all the software does is what it normally does, arrange pixels. Except now it tints other pictures to make those pixels. Bleh.
If it took actual pictures based on their content and fit them to make a picture, that would be cooler, but you would need a wider and more varied image sample to do so.
@Ghede: Dude, what are you talking about? The software and the algorithm he did pics the frames based on hue and content. Look at the images in the gallery.
@Ghede:
too funny.
@Jesus Diaz: Ghede is right. The images aren't pure frames. They have been color corrected. HOWEVER, the fact that he used the CONTENT of the images for placement is a huge deal.
Way back in the day when I was about 20ish, my much younger brother gave me a Yoda mosaic poster for my birthday. A month or two later he was with my parents visiting me at college, and he was saddened to see that Yoda was not gracing the walls of my apartment.
I didn't quite know how to explain to him that although I did love him, and I did love Yoda, I also really liked getting laid.
Much time have yee, young padawan.
@Joseph: thats a big motherfucking lol
@flyboy: Heck, now we have to put up with PC fanboys. ;)
"Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed. The ability to build a mosaic is insignificant next to the power of a hobby that chicks will appreciate."
@WilCon: If you could find all the software he used on his PC for a MAC, then you might be going somewhere, else, well, I'll leave that up to your discretion.
@Samifumi: Finally, somebody said it!