Movie Basics

One powerful new feature in quadrium is the ability to generate movies. These movies are made by morphing one image into another. This assumes, of course, that there are states that are halfway between one image an another. For example, halfway between a fractal with a bailout value of 4.0 and another with a bailout value of 10.0 is the fractal with a bailout value of 7.0. On the other hand, halfway between a firetruck and a lamppost is pretty much undefined.

So what quadrium does is find what qualities are in common (either matching exactly, such as the two fractals mentioned above, or by being similar, such as two nodes both of which have a slider labelled "Scale"). Those things that are in common it can interpolate between, and for those things that don't match, it uses the value of the base image. Since this process finds what is "in between" two images, it is called "tweening".

There is, however, another layer on top of this, namely the context of the current image. All tweening (and movies in general) are based on the current image, even if the "key frames" come from different documents. So as a result, tweening will show you what is half way between two images as applied to the current document. So if you had two key frames with the fractal examples above, even though we know that halfway between these is a fractal with a bailout of 7.0, if the underlying image doesn't have a bailout parameter, you won't notice any change.

This may seem confusing at first, but some wonderful results will happen because of this. For example, as you edit the document's image, the movie that it would generate will automatically change as well (and still be based on the document's image, with properties obtained from the tweening data).