ao2.it
Antonio Ospite, theorist attacks

One of the first YouTube video I remember is Hyperactive by Lasse Gjertsen:

A similarly enjoyable video is Mario Bros Column Chromatography by Vittorio Saggiomo:

The two videos above were realized by manual editing the timeline in a video editor, however this long task can be —you know— automated, at least to some degree.

The idea came back to mind the other day, when I opened a MIDI file in Ardour and noticed that the track editor looked a lot like the video editor in Blender; that's when I realized that in the videos from above MIDI could have been used to represent the timeline of the samples in the video editor.

Maybe not the most original idea (I later found out that the midi-vidi project did something similar), but cool enough to make me actually do something to see how the result would look like.

In the vidi-player repository there is some code I wrote to play with this idea.

A first example of a video made with it is Monkey Island - Scumm Bar Theme, made with vidi-timeline, it's still glitchy and uses a very dull “VideoFont”, but it shows the concept (no graphical video-editors were used in the making of this video):

In the vidi-player repository there is also a vidi-sampler program which allows to play video samples in real-time following the note events from a MIDI controller.

If you have ideas about a more interesting “VideoFont”, or about how to improve the code, get in touch.