Play with objects inside videos using DimP

You are watching an amazing video, and somewhere the thoughts of manipulating the video strikes you? Manipulation? Before telling you what I mean, first and foremost:

You need softwares which are expensive if you are doing it just to kill some time.

Now, manipulating video means you can play with the objects/items which are seen inside the video! In other words you can move the character in the video as you like.

Hard to believe if such an application exists? The short answer is yes, there is a freeware available that goes with the name DimP.

Watch this quick one-minute video to understand how manipulation of video works:

Some more videos - One minute teaser and Longer video with explanation

This is manipulation! Direct manipulation is always an illusion produced by having user’s gestures match the resulting motions on the screen as closely as possible but remember you are never physically manipulating objects.This technique benefits in tasks such as professional and amateur video editing, review of sports footage, and forensic analysis of video scenes and to find out magic tricks.

Anywayz this awesome free software is called DimP. The way it works is quite simple:

1. DimP automatically extracts object motions from the videos.
2. DimP then allows the user to control video playback by scrubbing these objects on their trajectories.

DimP requires the following features installed on your computer

• Windows XP and Vista compatible.
• 1 GB of RAM.
• Microsoft .NET 2.0 runtime. Download it here (22 MB).
• A VfW (Video for Windows) MPEG-4 codec such as ffdshow.

Currently DimP video manipulation software supports Windows and also MAC.The DimP team is  working hard to add many new features.For now you you can test DimP with other video files, provided that:

• Your video is short. The current prototype decompresses the whole video into memory, so it is not able to handle videos of several minutes.
• Your video is of acceptable quality: not heavily compressed and with a sufficient frame rate. Video resolution does not affect processing time.
• Your video is in the .avi format and uses a codec compatible with VfW (Video for windows)

Download DimP for your Windows
Download DimP for your MAC

Written by Sidharth on June 20th, 2008

Self-proclaimed geek, editor of blogote, who loves all things tech.