gauge
AI-assisted project. This codebase was created with Claude
(Anthropic), directed and reviewed by a human author. Every claim below is measured:
an offline harness drives the real plugin classes in a headless GL context and reads
each one back out of the picture. Every format's holes, pictures and frame
lines come back at the published dimensions to within float, a round disc through a 2×
squeeze comes back half as wide as it is tall, every frame of a moving strip keeps the
picture it was exposed with, the countdown runs frame for frame to the picture at
exactly eight seconds (or eight beats, on the bar), and the optical track is the sound at
the film's speed. Ten negative controls prove the checks can fail. It's never been
loaded into Resolume on macOS; oxbow, a real
FFGL host that isn't Resolume, loads both bundles there.
On Windows, both load, register and render in Resolume Arena 7.27.1 on a machine with
software rendering and no GPU or sound device, every control is as declared, and every
control that can act without sound changed the picture there but two of the leader's, which
were too close to call.
The full rundown is under Status, and every control is in the
user guide.
The film strip itself, as two FFGL plugins for Resolume Arena and
Avenue: SW Gauge, an effect that prints your clip onto 35 mm, 16 mm or Super 8, and
SW Gauge Leader, a source that runs the countdown.
Strip mode over Resolume's bundled IntoTheGlow_02, Surround set to Clip: the clip
full screen, and a strip of its own recent past running across it. Rendered by gutest --pipe, the offline harness, not captured from Resolume.
Download
v0.1.0 — prebuilt for macOS and Windows. Pick your platform:
All builds, checksums and release notes: github.com/stoatworks-labs/gauge/releases.
macOS builds are signed and notarised and open normally. The Windows builds are unsigned, so SmartScreen warns once.
The one idea
A film strip is a standard.
Every gauge's perforations, pitch, apertures and soundtrack areas are published, in
inches mostly, by people who cared a great deal about thousandths of them. So the strip
here is built in film millimetres from those numbers, a camera looks at it, and each frame
on it is exposed once and keeps that picture as it travels. There's no grain, no gate
weave and no faded dye; rebate does the
emulsion and gate does the projector, and gauge
sits happily in front of either.
What falls out
None of these is drawn at a place on the screen. Each is the strip doing what it does:
- Perforations, frame lines and borders where the standards put them. 35 mm's KS holes
are 2.794 mm across and 1.981 along, four to a frame on a 4.75 mm pitch, with the frame
line midway between two of them. 16 mm's frame line runs through its hole. Super 8's
one small hole, 0.914 mm across and 1.143 along, sits beside the middle of its frame.
- The frame line is what the aperture leaves. Academy's thick black bar (3 mm) and
Scope's hairline (0.4 mm) are the same subtraction, the camera aperture's height from the
frame pitch. Super 8's comes to 0.014 mm, which is to say the frames very nearly touch.
- The anamorphic squeeze. The picture is exposed through a 2× lens on Scope (or 1.33×,
1.5× or 2× on anything else), so a round face is a tall thin one on the print. The
leader on a Scope print is squeezed too.
- A moving strip is a contact strip of the clip's past. A frame is exposed when it
comes into view and keeps that picture all the way across, so whatever the clip did half
a second ago is still going past.
- The frame above the gate is the one before. In Cell mode the gate's frame shows the
clip as it is now; the sliver of the frame above it is the last picture before the
pull-down.
- The optical track is the sound. The variable-area track wiggles with the music
coming in on the Audio input, drawn at the film's speed, so a high note is a finer
ripple than a low one. Scope prints carry the lot: the stereo analogue track, DTS time
code beside it, Dolby Digital blocks between the holes and SDDS down both edges, all as
data without a logo in sight.
- The countdown is film too. PICTURE START, then 8 to 3 a second apart with the sweep
going round, the C C F F control frames on the four, the 2 for a single frame with its
pop on the soundtrack, black, and the picture at exactly eight seconds. At Rate Beat a
count is a beat, and Start On Bar puts the picture on a downbeat two bars later. On a
moving strip the leader goes past as a row of numbered frames.
- A sync flash is one fully exposed frame. One film frame long, wherever it lands, on a
press, a beat or a bar.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
