so i gave video strokerization a try and it turned out pretty cool. here you can see the nine inch nails march of the pigs music video strokerized:

nine inch nails march of the pigs strokerized! from blackpawn on Vimeo.

for this i told strokerizer it could only paint 64 brush strokes each frame so it didn't get much chance to fill in fine details with the camera always moving around like crazy. :) it wound up making for a nice loose look.

on the code side i managed some more optimizations and am finding my way around nVidia's CUDA visual profiler pretty well now. my laptop's 9600M GPU gets completely pegged now which is great. on my desktop the GTX280 though is just too fast that it's still finishing work faster than the CPU can feed it. i think i'll have to move more parts of the algorithm over to the GPU to fix that.