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ObjectusVideo Home is finally here 

As an avid golfer, the creator of the StatDoctor golf statistics package, and a Mac user and programmer since 1984, I've been working on bringing a video analysis package to the Mac for longer then I care to admit.  Unfortunately, this was impossible to do for a very long time.  I know, I've tried.

Any Mac based solution was ultimately going to need to be based on QuickTime, or be written completely from scratch.  Writing one completely from scratch would have been a huge undertaking, and there would not have been enough market support to even remotely cover the expense.  And integration with QuickTime was not possible either.

All that changed, and continues to change rapidly.  Apple has been re-writing QuickTime, and making it more accessible with each and every OS release since 10.4. And I have been working on ObjectusVideo ever since.  Mostly in little fits and starts now and again.  But as things began to come together, I started devoting more of more of my time (not just spare) to it.

The cool thing is that I've been using for my own swing since I got an early version working about a year ago.  I've been looking at the first video I shot for analysis and comparing it my swing this year, and what a dramatic difference.  My club head speed has increased dramatically as the extra movements I had been doing in my swing have been reduced.  I can't wait to get the club head speed measurements finished up for the pro version, so I can actually see the difference.  But I'm excited, as the club head just makes a different sound now.

I hope it helps you as much as it's helped me.  And stay tuned.  This is just the beginning.  There is a lot more coming,

Joe

So here we go.  This project I have been working on literally around the clock, seven days a week, for the last few months, and before that, on and off for about 3 years is finally ready for release.  It wasn't supposed to go this way, but it is what it is, and here it is.

It was supposed to be a video analysis program, where you would draw lines, circles, and squares and such on a video, and be able to analyze angles and distances, and the speed of objects moving in the video.

But at some point, while working on the video analysis software, it occurred to me, that instead of drawing a line, I could draw a saber and use it for doing movie style special effects.  So I duplicated the video analysis xCode project, renamed it SaberFX, and started to work on it as a video effects program.

Initially I started drawing colored lines over the top of the toy saber in the videos, just as in the video analysis software, and then later, that would be rendered into a glowing saber when the video was created.  And that worked great, but what if instead of drawing a colored line, we could draw the fully rendered saber in real time, during the drawing process.  Would it really be possible to have the fully rendered saber drawn in real time, tracking the mouse movements?  So I set about merging the rendering code with the live drawing code, compiled the project, and ran it.

I honestly wasn't expecting much, and figured it wouldn't run properly the first time, and even if it did, it would be too slow to be used as the basis for the UI.  To my surprise, I selected the saber tool, and clicked and dragged from the handle, and there it was, in all its glowing glory: a saber, being rendered in real time and dragged around by it's end point. 

I guess I'm easily impressed, but I thought it was one of the coolest things I'd ever seen.  It's amazing how powerful our computers are these days to be able to do this.  The live drawing works for all the tools in SaberFX.

So that's the story, and now it's in your hands.  You be the judge (and the Jedi), and take it as far as you can.

Joe