Best software in the world, ever

This is a small post totally unrelated to vst plugin development, but I feel I need to share this discovery with any readers. SWTSG is a bit of software which makes the Star Wars opening text crawl with the Lucas Art’s and 20th Century Fox logos also. The results are nothing short of stunning, but you’ll need access to a mac to use it unless you want to port it (the source is freely available on the website). There is a tutorial on how to merge all of the bitmaps generated by the software into a video file, but I found it much easier to use Matlab to do it for me. Here is my little Matlab script contribution.

close all; clear all; clc
bmpDir = 'bmps';

aviobj = avifile('demo', 'compression', 'divx', 'fps', 25);
x = dir(bmpDir);
ofst = 4;
for n = 1+ofst:numel(x)
    frm = im2frame(imread(fullfile(bmpDir, x(n).name)));
    aviobj = addframe(aviobj,frm);
    disp(n)
end
aviobj = close(aviobj);

Put the bitmaps into a sub folder named “bmps” and then just run the script from the top directory. This will generate a Divx movie called “demo.avi”, which will look awesome and be about 8MB for 2 minutes of video using the ‘large’ setting in the SWTSG renderer software. If you don’t have divx installed, you can download it from here or change ‘divx’ to ‘none’ in the above script, although this will create a much larger file.