This year’s Macworld, due to hit San Francisco in January, is shaping up to be an epic event for visuals and motion graphics. True, Macworlds of late have paled in comparison to the heyday of the conferenece, but this year looks extraordinary, especially if you’re interested in motion graphics and visuals, especially since there’s a mini Flashforward rolled up into the goodness and the whole event takes place on the eve of Flash 9’s release. I’ll be in on the action with a session on January 10 (just slip out of one of the other events and drop by for an hour if you have to), and will be in the area all week — read, we should have some great parties.
And, Flash aside, I’m fairly certain this will be the first appearance of Processing at Macworld, so anyone else who wants to find ways to slip Processing onto the show floor, let me know.
Here’s a video roundup for you fans of Quartz Composer, the powerful, free live motion graphics synthesizer and developer tool on Mac OS X 10.4 and later. Korg KAOSS Pad 3s and game controllers prove again to be very cool controllers for visual performance. If you’re not a QC user, these will work well with other custom visual apps, too (Jitter, Pd/GEM, vvvv, Processing, etc.).
Korg KAOSS Pad as Live Visual Controller
Via Matrixsynth, the new Korg KAOSS Pad 3 proves to be a truly powerful tool for manipulating live visuals. As opposed to previous KAOSS Pads, which had only an undifferentiated X/Y pad, the KP3 has LED feedback that allows you to create custom grid interfaces. This gets put to powerful effect by mapping MIDI input to custom synthesized 3D visualization patches in Quartz Composer, courtesy YouTube user porchka66. Assuming you’ve got a Mac to run it (mini for six hundred bucks, perhaps?), you’ve got a powerful custom visual synthesizer with more flexibility than pricey options like the Edirol CG-8, at a tiny fraction of the price. If you don’t like the look of the visuals here, incidentally, you can patch your custom visuals to look like whatever you want (something that’s harder with closed-box hardware).
Game Controller as Visual Controller / Synth
Too poor to buy a KP3? Use a cheap game controller instead. That’s what our friend Surya Buchwald did in a recent experiment, courtesy the lovely game controller-to-MIDI utility on Mac, Junxion:
Simple results so far, but this should give you other ideas. I really like the synesthesia going here, with the patch acting both as visual and sonic synthesizer.
I’m surprised there aren’t more game controllers out there in performances; they’re cheap, there’s a wide variety of designs, and they’re reasonably easy to configure for use with Macs and PCs. (Xbox 360 controllers now work on PCs, too, and I expect might be adapted to Mac use, as well. PS/2 and GameCube controllers can be used with cheap USB adapters on any platform.) The results, again, can be anything you want them to be.
Quartz Composer Meets After Effects
In a combination you don’t often encounter, After Effects and Quartz Composer both got applied to this music video production, by Tim Jaeger (also on The Lava Blog; thanks for the correction). I love the minimalist, graphic look, with QC visuals evidently generated dynamically by the music:
Gaming gurus can obsess all they want about things like vertex performance. What I see when I look at the video card lineup is that graphics cards right now are very, very cheap for the performance they deliver. With DirectX 10 just over the horizon but not yet here on Windows, the current generation of cards just keeps getting cheaper, all while gaining from tweaks in performance and power. Result? $150 buys you an excellent graphics card if you’ve got a PC case that can handle it. (Small form factor Shuttle, anyone?)
Budget ATI salvo
Today’s announcement is that ATI is coming out with its own X1650 XT offering to counter the dominance of the NVIDIA 7600 GT. When it ships mid-month, the 1650 should be priced at around $150, provided vendor partners don’t up the price. That could make it an excellent deal if you want to stick with ATI, though the 7600 GT remains a fantastic card; I have one in my Shuttle and love it.
For VJs and live visualists, a cheap but reliable video card is a great asset. I use my 7600 to power custom graphics in Unreal, 3D in Processing and Jitter, and better video performance. What’s stunning is that the cards that were $300 this summer are now going for US$150, so if you’ve been waiting to upgrade, now is the time. Put it on your Christmas list if you have to. Coverage of the new card has been quick in appearing:
Since receiving my Arduino I’ve found myself looking at technology a little differently. As your post-production skills increase you tend to watch videos thinking: “I could do that”, or “I could do that if someone gave me lots of money and got out of my way”. In my post-Arduino life I now look at technology and think either, “I wonder how I could interface my arduino with that,” or “I wonder if anyone will mind if I pull that apart.”
Nobody will mind if you pull an old Inkjet printer apart. Every house has at least one in a cupboard somewhere, kept because it cost good money back in the day, but now replaced by all in one devices which cost less than their own replacement ink cartridges. My household had 6 mothballed inkjets. Now there’s only 5, and my parts box is filled with cool bits and pieces.
Just scroll down through heap of stuff on talks.html page and pick your faves. I highly recomend to see the stuff by Thomas Vriet and Aymeric Mansoux (those guys are rockstars of geek world 4 sure)
I’ve got to admit, the video and audio quality is terrible, the videos are rather long (Arduino one is 2.5 hours) and boring in places, but there’s some fascinating material in there, and if that’s not enough for you, check out the opening slide from Arduino Co-Creator David Cuartielles’ talk:
Arduino: Just like drugs.
I just, like, spent $100 on my Arduino habit today, buying extra breadboard sections, 555 timers, resistor and capacitor packs, 240v relays… Or as the police will surely come to refer to them: Paraphernalia.
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