Media: Image and Video

The Pharos controller can be programmed using a mix of preprogrammed effects, custom effects, and image and video media. This section focuses on issues relating to importing and displaying media files.

As discussed in the Fixture Mapping section, a Pharos timeline can display an image or a video by rendering it onto a rectangular pixel grid overlaid over a pixel matrix fixture mapping which aligns each fixture element with a single source pixel. Our preferred pixel mapping places each fixture within a 4x4 cell of a 228x8 image, so the following discussion assumes all content will be resized to a 228x8 pixel grid during display.

Codecs and File Formats

The Pharos Designer 2 application appears to use the ffmpeg libraries internally for video processing and so it can accept a wide variety of video and image file formats.

The recommended tool for displaying the wide variety of acceptable video content is VLC media player.

Preferred Video Formats

PNG in an AVI file. This rather obscure format is lossless and can represent each individual fixture element without encoding distortions. Much of the Python sample code generates video files in this format using the OpenCV libraries to control the underlying ffmpeg codecs.

Apple ProRes 4444 in a MOV file. This is a high quality intermediate codec used by Apple tools. The high bitrate is mitigated by our very small frame size.