tl;dr version: Is there any way to stream -extract a row of pixels from an input image without having to read the entire input image off the disk? I'm currently trying to do this with IM's stream -extract and PPM input images—should I be looking into IM's memory-mapped MPC format instead (trying that with stream thus far has yielded no errors but zero KB output files)? If this can't be done with ImageMagick, is there something that can do it (e.g. NetPBM's "pamcut"—the documentation on the site seems unclear, to me, on this point)?
The long version: This thread: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=25870
The medium version: I'm basically trying to take an arbitrarily large set of input images (but all of which have the same pixel dimensions and color depth), and iteratively assemble a set of output images such that output image [n] is comprised of each row[n] from every input image. So output image 1 will contain the first row of pixels from every input image, one after the other; output image 2 will contain the second row of pixels from every input image, one after the other; etc.. At the end of this process I'll have as many output images as the input images have rows of pixels (and, it follows, the number of rows of pixels in each output image will be equal to the number of input files). I'm doing this with a bash script on Mac OS X because I am not a programmer (and barely a scripter). The full script has a lot of other hoo-hah that isn't relevant to this question, so I've made a (more hard-coded, less finesse-y) testing script, which currently looks like this:
Code: Select all
#!/bin/bash
# ImageMagick Tests for mbarcode.sh
mkdir -p tempcrops
echo -e "Dumping PPMs..."
ffmpeg -an -sn -i ${1} -r 0.25 -vf "transpose=1" -pix_fmt rgb24 -f image2 -vcodec ppm tempcrops/f_%05d.ppm &> /dev/null
mkdir -p anim
FILES=($(find "tempcrops" -type f -name *.ppm | sort))
echo -e "Assembling barcodes..."
for (( c=0; c<1920; c++ )); do
echo "$(printf %04d $((${c}+1))) of 1920..."
for f in ${FILES[@]}; do
stream -map rgb -storage-type char -extract 1080x1+0+${c} ${f} -
done |\
convert -depth 8 -size 1080x${#FILES[@]} rgb:- -rotate -90 anim/barcode_$(printf %05d ${c}).png
done
rm -rf tempcropsIf that's the case, though, it means BOTH could be faster, if I could find a method to avoid having to read the entire input file off the disk when I know exactly which part (row) I want.
It was suggested in that thread that I might try outputting each row to its own file first, and append using a clever loop. However, that requires generating something on the order of 3.6 million 2 - 3KB temp files for an HD input (1920 images with 1920 rows each), and since I'm on a Mac (with fseventsd running and relying on the increasingly creaky HFS+ file system), that's something I'd like to avoid if at all possible.
