Fiche
Browsing a microfiche reader, for Resolume
What it does
An FFGL effect for Resolume Arena and Avenue: SW Fiche, browsing a microfiche reader. The clip's printed as a grid of frames on a card, the card goes in a reader, and somebody browses it, with whip pans across the card, overshoot and correction, crash zooms out to find the next frame and back in, and the hunt for focus when they get there.
The trick is that a microfiche reader magnifies a hand. The screen shows about a centimetre of film at 24×, so every movement on the carriage, every flick of the zoom and every turn of the focus knob arrives on screen twenty-four times bigger. A comfortable 50 mm a second on the carriage is more than a metre a second across the screen.
So the plugin is a model of the hand and a model of the reader. The hand makes aimed movements that obey Fitts's law, follow a minimum-jerk profile, land a little short with a scatter in proportion to how far they went, and get corrected when they miss. It zooms out to travel and back in to read, and it hunts for focus, turning the knob past sharp, noticing a reaction time later and turning back more slowly. The carriage is a mass on the hand's grip, so a fast pan stopped hard overshoots and settles.
The reader is geometric optics: a blur circle from the magnification and the f-number, a zoom that throws the focus as it moves, a card bowed between its glass plates so every frame focuses at its own height, a lamp, a hotspot, and a rear-projection screen with its own grain. The film is silver, diazo or vesicular, with dust and scratches in the emulsion and a title in the header, and past the card's edge is the reader's bright glass. Every pixel adds up the light across the exposure and the aperture, so the smear of a pan and the softness of a hunt are the same light. Every choice is seeded, so a show browses the same way every time.
- An operator who browses by itself: reading in order, skimming, searching the card or a mix, on its own clock or on the host's beat
- Pans that obey Fitts's law with a minimum-jerk profile, land short with a scatter in proportion to the distance, and are corrected
- Crash zooms out to travel and back in, on a zoom that does not hold focus
- A focus hunt with a reaction time: past sharp, back, past again by less, and a poor operator starts the wrong way
- A carriage on the hand's grip, from rigid to a loose 3 Hz bounce, with end stops at the card's edges
- A card of up to 16 × 16 frames, live or filmed by a step-and-repeat camera, on silver, negative, diazo, vesicular or colour film, bowed, dusty and scratched, with a title in its header
- A 2×–75× reader at f/2–f/16 with a hotspot, a lamp from 2000 K to white, screen grain and room light; Manual hands you the carriage, the zoom and the knob
- Universal macOS bundle and a Windows x64 DLL
Where it stands
Released at v0.2.0, and early days. v0.2.0 adds Layout, where Endless turns the card's frames into an endless page with no header, no glass and no end stops. It hasn't been loaded into Resolume on macOS yet. On Windows, a build of v0.1.0 (from before Layout) loads, registers and renders in Resolume Arena 7.27.1 on software rendering (no GPU), with every parameter as declared and all 9 of the fleet's checks passed. 26 of 32 controls moved the picture and none read dead; the six that steer the operator over several seconds were inconclusive from single grabs of a moving reader. The reader and the hand are measured offline, by a harness driving the real plugin: a perfect reader showing one frame gives back the clip, an out-of-focus point is the disc geometric optics says it should be, the card's bow reads back out of the picture to 0.0003 mm, the picture follows the hand through pans, corrections and crash zooms, the pans obey Fitts's law and minimum jerk, the hunt turns where the reaction time puts it, and acts land on the beat. It catches twenty-five models broken on purpose and thirteen one-character sabotages of its own code, and all 34 controls change the picture. The motor laws come from the literature, but the constants are typical rather than one particular person's, and the films are typical rather than any datasheet's. The macOS build is signed and notarised. There's a user guide and a browser demo, but no presets and no OpenFX port. Try it in your own rig before you trust it in a show.
Watch it running
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