[centerchannel68]

Hi, I have a few hours of footage of 4 cricket cages, from above, and each cricket is being fed a different stimulant. I would like some sort of 'motion tracking' plugin, something that could tell me which one is moving the most, or the fastest, and if not, a slightly ghetto way to do it would be overlaying all the frames. Is this possible? The camera is on a tripod, so overlaying all the frames from certain points would help show which cricket is moving the most.

[Uncle Skeleton]

I don't understand. Do you want data read out at the end, or a blue dot over the cricket like on NHL, or a scorecard rendered on the screen like a timestamp? What's your goal?

[centerchannel68]

I want to throw all the frames on top of each other. Like layers in OSX. That'd be an easy way to see which cricket moved the most, as one would have a bigger 'blob' of movement.

[alligator]

You could combine individual frames in Photoshop, but I doubt you can layer video very easily. Probably the only software that could do this, if it exists, would be Final Cut Pro.

[centerchannel68]

Yes, how?

[Uncle Skeleton]

You can export to an image sequence from QT Pro (or QTAmateur no doubt), then merge them in the likes of photoshop. I don't know how PS "actions" are made, but there must be one to merge many image files.

From an experimental design strategy though it seems like you should be tracking the bug the whole time, so if one is running in circles for example it will show more movement than one that walks slowly around a larger area and then goes to sleep.

[centerchannel68]

Yeah, but this can be crude.

[centerchannel68]

So is there a way to open up a few thousand images in photoshop, all in the same file? Instead of different files?

[Uncle Skeleton]

I would guess "automate" in the File menu, and create an action to copy the opened files into a layer of an existing image. Use the "difference" setting of the layers palette.