Flipbook

Point it at a page of stills, tell it how many columns and rows, and it plays the cells as an animation — in Resolume Arena and Avenue, and in DaVinci Resolve, Nuke, Natron and Vegas from the same code. It ships as two plugins rather than one, because FFGL resolves a single entry point per binary: Flipbook is a source that plays a sheet over its own background, and Flipbook Over is an effect that plays one over the clip it sits on — or takes that clip as the sheet, so Resolume's own media management does the file handling.

It plays most of what already exists. VFX sheets — explosions, muzzle flashes, impacts, smoke — usually 5×5 or 8×8 and usually on white or black rather than with an alpha channel, which is what the Luma key handles. Game sprite sheets with a walk, a run and an idle on separate rows: Start Frame and Frame Count cut one run out, so a four-frame idle and an eight-frame run are two parameter sets on the same sheet. Pixel art kept as pixel art, at nearest-neighbour, so a 32px sprite scales to a metre of LED wall with its edges intact. Pages of whole frames, where one cell covers the raster. And animated GIFs, which bring their own frame count and lay themselves out.

The frame on screen is a closed-form function of the clock. Nothing is advanced, there is no counter, and no state carries between frames — which matters more than it sounds. Twelve frames at twelve frames a second is one second of animation, and if you have cued that against a bar you expect the loop to land on the bar line every time. A player that advanced a counter once per rendered frame would instead run at whatever rate Resolume managed that night: fine in the preview, a quarter of a frame short per bar once the show gets heavy, and visibly adrift by the end of the track. Closed-form, the loop point cannot drift however far the frame rate falls, and locking to the host's beat or bar is a different clock rather than a second code path.

The control worth finding first is Stagger. Up to sixty-four copies arrange themselves in a grid, a ring or a scatter, and Stagger offsets each copy's position in the run by a fixed number of frames — so instead of a wallpaper of sprites doing the same thing at the same instant, one animation travels through the field.

There is a browser demo that runs the plugin's own playback and placement in WebGL2, and it takes your own sprite sheet: drop a file on the page and it plays, with nothing uploaded anywhere.