When using media within Vuo there are many times when you want to be able to loop - or do things with the time of a movie using vuo.image.decodeImage.
Currently to achieve this you need to use vuo.video.info to get media duration, then use calculate to calculate modulo.
It would be great if vuo.image.decodeImage also output duration as well, to be able to complete this calculation with less nodes.
For looping, we could actually streamline that more by adding a Loop input port to Decode Movie Image, similar to the ones on Play Movie and Curve.
Are there any other calculations you expect to be doing frequently with the duration?
Well if we wanted to add a fade out of the video stream we would need to know the time before the fadeout time.
But I’m more interested in having the time duration easily accessible.
OK, so this feature request is to add a Duration port to Decode Movie Image that does the same thing as Get Movie Info, to save one the trouble of having to add the Get Movie Info node.
The trouble is, this would add a bit of complexity to the Decode Movie Image node without streamlining things very much (reduction by 1 node). It could raise questions for the user like: why does the Duration port output the same thing every frame? does it do anything different than the Get Movie Info node? why doesn’t Play Movie have a Duration port? If it sounds like I’m being picky, well, I am, but hopefully for a good cause: trying to make nodes as easy to understand as possible.
If you have ideas to more significantly streamline tasks like adding a fade-out to a video stream, let me know. I’ve branched feature request Add a Loop input port to ‘Decode Movie Image’.
The other alternative is to output a countdown? So we know when the video file will end? That would save time for end users, and also simplify composition coding. For fading then all we would need to do is have logic connected to the countdown output!
What do you think of that @jstrecker?
After mulling it over for a while, we came up with a different approach: Movie duration from ‘Play Movie’ and ‘Decode Movie Image’. What do you think?