Claus Helfenschneider

True Color

Info

Title

True Color

Director

Claus Helfenschneider

Release Date

2008

Genre

One Second / Experimental / Algorithmic

Outline

This video shows 16 million different colors (16777216, to be exact), which is the maximum amount of colors that can be displayed in RGB space using 8 bits per channel. This amount of colors is often referred to as "true color". Each pixel in the video has a unique color that does not appear twice in the video. The resolution of the video is 820x820, and it has 25 frames, therefore the amount of pixels in the complete video is just enough to display all these colors. The sound is an exact reflection of the images — it is a sine wave, pitching from 20Hz to 20.000Hz, which is the complete perceptible spectrum of sound for the human ear.

Although the video does not seem to tell an obvious story, it contains all preexisting material that is needed to create a video. It is like an experimental meta-video. With a smiling glance in its face, and on an irreducibly minimal level, it shows the color-palette of an animator or film-maker.

The video was algorithmically created using JAVA-based "Processing" (processing.org).

Related

On allRGB.com, Alexander Christiaan Jacob and others present still images containing the complete RGB color gamut.