Digital Workshop

Told you I'd be back soon.

Another simple assumption proven wrong...that there would be an Opus action to reverse video playback. This is obviously not too hard even for Windows as even Media Player can scrub backwards. However, I am not finding any references to such.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Dave

Dave
Please tell me why you want to reverse the video
I just don't know why someone would want to do this, so enlighten me please
Cheers
GRaham

I am working on a simulator of an ST-80 iron roughneck, a device which replaces the tong torque wrench on drilling rigs. It has a six function set of levers to move it forward/back, up/down, torque wrench/spinner wrench mode, clamp/unclamp, make/break torque, and spin in/out. In order for these levers to accurately simulate the action of the machine the trainee needs to be able to freely use the controls. Take forward/back. If the student moves the machine forward, then moves the mouse down to "back," the simplest way to show this is to reverse the video. Otherwise you have to use a separate clip and a load more code, plus you have a glitch where you hide the forward video and display the back video.

I am surprised this has not been addressed before as it is a common need in simulation. It is possible that Opus is really not the best medium for this, but I've been using Opus since the mid-90's (Illuminatus) for rapid prototypeing of such things and I am familiar with it (though certainly no guru). In my present position I do not yet have access to real codeheads to write the kind of routines my designs often require. I am hoping to make this work as this is a 3 billion dollar operation excited about the possibilities of interactive but still pretty much stuck in traditional OJT/classroom training. Opus could get a LOT of publicity in the petrochemicals industry if I can get this going. As you are probably (painfully) aware, there is beaucoups of money available in oil at the moment.

Hope that helps...

Also hope I get an answer to the problem!!!

Dave

Most video formats cannot be played backwards with any degree of smoothness or ease - see this thread on these forums for more information and explanations.

You can seek most video formats (except steaming WMVs which do not allow any sort of seeking at all), so you could possibly code your simulation to seek to locations within the videos, though this would not be smooth.

I would suggest that it will be simpler to use multiple videos that play in the right directions.

Well, I've no desire to debate a High Code Priest, but...

I use full DV-AVI and it plays as smoothly backwards as it does forward. That is not my problem. The problem is no controls in Opus to make it happen, at least that I can find.

If you have access to Pinnacle Studio (around USD 100.00) it does this flawlessly, as do a number of other cheap or free players/editors.

Perhaps you guys could look into providing such controls. As Opus grows more and more guys like me are going to need to do this. At the moment I am stuck doing what you said...using multiple videos. It is a major headache as it will take 24 clips to do the job of 12 to complete this simulator and the transitions are never going to be smooth from one action to the other.. Without the ability to have full video control I'll likely have to sub-out this section to codeheads and call it as a sub-routine from Opus. That is going to be expensive and a discredit to Opus potential. The last really great tool on WinTel was ToolBook. Now all we have is Macromedia (yuk) and Opus (generally Hoorah!).

All I need is a couple of hooks to simulate a jog/shuttle controller.
Dave