Video Glitch Tool

An experimental tool to produce video glitches

Disclaimer

This is very experimental and did not have the chance for tests on any systems other than macOS yet.

Why?

• I like the idea of using video data as material that can be mixed and scrambled around, as one could do it with physical matter. I tried to manifest that through the code as well.
• Initially, I wanted to automate the process of messing with video data in a hex-editor (e.g. Hex Fiend) and in essence, this is what the tools are doing.
• I was interested in being able to use two (or more?) videos and mixing them would bring pretty interesting results.
• My research in already existing tools might be poor (as it was not the point of this project) but I have not seen other tools that work in the same way yet.

How does it work?

• I tried to turn this into a command-line tool. It is far from perfect but my idea was that it would make the use quick, easy and more fun for everybody, including myself.
• I decided to make two sorts of variants of the tool because both mix the data in different ways.

Both take the same input arguments:

python one_of_the_tools.py video_file_a video_file_b frame_type

E.g.:

python remix_frames.py videoA.avi videoB.avi P

As explained above, the tools use data from two videos and will mix a specified frame type (I-, P- or B-frame, specifying a single letter is enough) from those videos. I found that .avi works best but in theory, you could use any format. The video will be baked and filed into the repository you would previously cd'd to.

Ideas for future iterations

• The tools could be combined into an all-in-one solution controlled via input arguments.
• There could be an option that mixes different frame types and not just one for more chaosss.

Please feel free to use and/or edit those tools as you like – I consider them as 100% open source. It would be awesome to see improvements and/or variations that could produce other interesting glitches and other things that people would come up with. I tried my best to comment on everything that has been used within the code. Constructive feedback is very much welcome ❤️

Originated from experiments in the context of Fabiola Hannah's (Un)Coding Video class at The New School.