Movie Barcodes are a cool, abstract kind of movie poster that uses a sampling of frames from a full-length movie to create a kind of color map of a movie’s palette. I was looking for a way to create them with readily available software and came up somewhat short. While there are some tools out there to make automated barcodes using scripting and stuff that makes my brain cry, I really wanted to find a way to do it myself with familiar tools. I’ll be using Nuke and Premiere Pro for this tutorial. The Nuke instructions are specific to Nuke and I haven’t found a way to do the same things in any other software. If you don’t have Nuke, you can head on over to The Foundry’s site and pick up a free non-commercial copy to use. The primary driver of this technique is the Nuke ContactSheet node.
As for Premiere, the tools I use in there should have an equivalent in any NLE. It's really just a retime. You could probably also do that in Nuke but it'll take longer.
The first thing you need to do is reduce the number of frames necessary to create your movie barcode. If you try to give nuke the whole original number of frames it'll be too much for the Nuke ContactSheet node to handle and Nuke will likely crash. To do this, bring the original file or sequence into your NLE and retime it significantly. In my case I chose to retime it to the number of horizontal pixels I'm planning to have in my final movie barcode. 1920 pixels, HD resolution. You can think of retiming the clip as taking a sampling of every nth frame of the original sequence. In Premiere switch the timecode display to 'frames' and set a marker at frame 1920. Using the retime tool squish the length of your clip's end to match the marker. The next thing you need to do is reduce the resolution of the frames. These frames are going to end up as 1 or so pixel per frame so you can go quite low. I chose 200 pixels wide. It really doesn't matter. Once again the goal is to give Nuke less to deal with when processing the contact sheet. Export this to an image sequence like PNG, DPX, etc. The format doesn't matter. I used PNG. You could probably also use MOV or AVI but I wouldn’t recommend it.
Next read your sequence into to nuke and create a ContactSheet node. The ContactSheet is intended to emulate making a contact sheet of negatives back when Cro Magnon man was developing film. Anyway, the node creates a grid of still frames depending on the number of frames you tell it to use. It occurred to me that using 1 row and however many columns as there are frames would essentially give us the basis of a movie barcode. Moving on…
Check the box that says “Use frames instead of inputs” then set the frame range to the full range of your sequence. The Resolution setting is somewhat arbitrary. You might think, as I did, that setting the ContactSheet’s resolution to your intended output resolution would be correct but it seems that the images sometimes end up in-between pixels and don’t show up well when doing that so you need more information. I set mine at 3000px. For rows/columns it’s simple. 1 row (1 pixel high), 1920 columns (1920 frames = 1920 pixels). Check the ‘center’ box so your 1920x1 image is in the center of the frame.
We now need to make our 1 pixel image into a bunch of colored lines. To do this, create a Transform node and scale the image way up vertically. I did 800.
In my case I wanted a 2.40:1 output so I also added a Reformat node set it to 1920x800. You can do this if you want but it’s not necessary.
After that I put a grade node on to bump up the contrast and saturation by pulling down the gamma a bit and pushing the gain way up to 4. Do this to your liking. That’s it. A movie barcode in Nuke. You can then write out your barcode to whatever format you prefer. I chose a 16bit LZW TIFF.
The final movie barcode of The Lost Starfighter.