Hi,

I have built a pd abstraction that glitches .MOV/.MP4 files. This is the result of a long process that involved the study and understanding of the way .MOV files work and their atom structure. Having learned a lot while developping my jpeg and mp3 glitchers, I have been willing to transpose this knowledge to the video realm. To make a long story short, my abstraction locates the mdat atom of the file, reads its length and glitches it in a user-controlable way, while leaving the rest of the filestructure untouched, allowing various degrees of glitchiness with very few unreadable files.

Of course, the bigger the files, he longer the processing time. I have able to glitch a 250 meg MP4 (40 minutes of video) in a bout 1 minute on a macbook pro running under OS 10.10 with the latest stable version of PD extended. On slower computers, processing may take up to 5/6 minutes. Also note that results will vary according to the codec used for compression. I have been able to get good results with H264, but they should all work. As usual with glitch, results will also vary according to the player you use. I personnaly prefer VLC . Some files may appear broken on some players and play just fine on others... Usually, if a file breaks in the process, just tweak the settings a bit to get less glitched file, it should work eventually. This is particulary thrue with small files.

Here's a bunch of stills I took from one processed video:

Here's the pd extend abstraction:

mp4glitcher.pd
It's a graph on parent abstraction, so the idea is to open it like an object in a blank canvas.

And here's the standalone version for mac:
https://1drv.ms/u/s!AjNgShvVLV0XikkivHwWok_tpbYQ

Your comments are welcome!

Wow! This is very neat! Quite excellent work and I am sure it was quite time intensive to put it all together. Just a while back I was looking into and reading about visual glitching more so in the still picture realm as I thought video was just too complex at the moment but looking over this again I see that it can be done just as well and implemented quite efficiently with motion picture.

Getting back into Pd I had really wanted to learn more about GEM and the visual processing side of it rather than the audio portion again. This is such a neat work to marvel at and something that definitely inspires me to keep learning and working.

Just curious, is this all created from a personal hobby or project or rather and academic or work venture?

Beautiful.

@austin_ep Thanks for your interest in the work. This was built on my spare time and has no connection to anything academic. I use these tools in my own artistic work. If you're intersetd in puredata and glitch art, you should definitely check Antonio Robert's blog: here. He's the one that got me into this! Oh, and you may wanna check my jpeg glitcher as well, it's on this site. Don't hesitate to drop me a line if you need guidance. Have fun!

David