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.
Peter Says: VJs in the mainstream? It’s happening, as VJs pick up gigs at huge headline events, tour with big-name acts, and even receive recognition from MTV. (You know, music television, remember them? They’re the folks that created the term VJ, only it meant something entirely different, and now they show neither music nor visuals, so whatever.)
Resolume have posted DJMag’s list for Top 20 VJs 2006. I’m sure the Resolume guys are proud as their software is wielded by ever more of the world’s favourite VJs. CDMo are proud of Holly Daggers for making it back in there again.
Take a look and let us know: any favorites? Any omissions you would want included? The results were democratic, based on a poll, so we can be equally democratic here on CDMo.
CamcorderInfo have posted a review on the new Sony HRD-SR1 tapeless HD camcorder. It records AVCHD (MPEG-4/H.264 based) format to an internal 30GB drive, which will apparently give you 4 hours of recording.
Sounds great! I’m completely sick of buying, labelling and especially rewinding tapes - it feels so ridiculous - and while the computer based capture options are impressive, the ability to just grab your camera and run will mean you get more video over time.
Note Regarding AVCHD camcorder support in Sony Vegas 7 software Sony Vegas 7 does not currently support the AVCHD camcorder format.
In Spring 2007, AVCHD camcorder support will be included in a free update for all registered Vegas 7 users.
That’s slightly annoying, but it will change quickly enough as users start clamouring for support, and down the bottom of the review they have hidden something rather exciting for visualists:
Smooth Slow Record - Smooth Slow Record is one of the cooler features included on consumer camcorders this year. It’s a Sony technology made possible by the data transfer rate of CMOS sensors, and records footage in slow-motion that can be viewed nearly instantaneously – after 12 seconds of processing time – in the case of the HDR-SR1. This feat is accomplished by increasing the rate at which fields are recorded from 60fps to 240fps in three-second bursts, and then recording those frames at normal speed. Video shot in Smooth Slow Record mode is dark, because the amount of light recorded is reduced. Smooth Slow Record is a neat party trick, and perhaps even a useful tool for “analysing golf swings,” as Sony advertises.
3 seconds isn’t very much recording, as this video shows, and naturally it’s at decreased resolution. I can’t find any solid numbers on this, but it seems that it also undergoes in-camera uprezzing, which is a little daft. Quirks aside though, this is a huge step forward for slow motion in consumer cameras. It will be interesting to see the footage which makes it to the web in the coming months.
Adobe keeps churning out apps and betas; the latest is a new lightweight audio editor called Soundbooth. I’ve done a detailed look at the beta for Create Digital Music, but here’s why visualists should be excited. First, of course, Adobe is building the app to try to court the Photoshop and Flash crowd to audio editing, for people who are intimidated by Adobe Audition or simply find it overkill for what they’re doing. (Honestly, it’s overkill for some musicians, too.) For that function, it fits the bill, and is worth keeping around even if you just want to speed up the process of normalizing and adding fades to audio. The second reason, though, is that even in this early beta, Adobe is building new integration with Flash. You can place markers in a recording (even as you record, if you’re recording into Soundbooth), then export the marker list via XML to Flash. That means you can cue animations to sound; hopefully in future you’ll also be able to cue sounds to animation and access this functionality via ActionScript, minus the use of the Flash app. I’d love to use this for interactive design work I’m doing that involves sound. Adobe has promised more of this kind of integration in the future, so I expect the upcoming revision of Creative Suite will give us more of this kind of stuff. In the meantime, if you work with sound at all, Soundbooth could be a useful download on Mac and PC:
So, in review, if you want to boot your new MacBook into Windows XP, all will be fine — unless you happen to need to connect video output via VGA or S-Video. That means you’ll need to either use all-DVI monitors and projectors, or … well, stay away from Boot Camp, basically. This sounds particularly nasty on the MacBook, which doesn’t have a dedicated output port. In fairness, Boot Camp is still beta, but if dual-booting Windows is a big factor in your purchase decision, you might want to investigate seriously.
What I find puzzling is, why would this be an issue at all? Is there something really strange about Apple’s video drivers in Windows XP? Is there something weird in Windows to begin with? If anyone has a machine with Boot Camp, please, let us know if you can test this and see what’s going on. (And does the same thing happen with Vista? Linux? Parallels Desktop, when you’re running Windows apps inside Mac OS X? I would think not the latter, but no idea on the other cases.) Thanks to Robotkid, and to Chris Breen for sorting me out.
For more information, Bart from Resolume points us to this vjcentral thread, further evidence that I really should have been paying closer attention to this issue:
Maybe mankind was never intended to run both Mac and Windows. Perhaps I should rid my mind of such unnatural desires. Anyone with a clue on what’s going on, please chime in. (I mean, I know it doesn’t work, but why not, I wonder?)
Updated: Quick clarification. Apparently the DVI-to-VGA adapter does work on the MacBook Pro. (Keep in mind, the MacBook lacks even a dedicated DVI; you have to use a dongle.) So the current score is, unless I’m mistaken:
MacBook VGA: No.
MacBook S-Video: No.
MacBook Pro VGA: Yes.
MacBook Pro S-Video: No.
Still disturbing. Given that Apple is aware of the issue, it seems a fix is likely; it’s just a matter of how long you’re willing to wait and what the technical obstacles are to making it work.
Fantastical video blog No Fat Clips has just concluded Floria’s Day, showcasing 3 videos from Italian director Floria Sigismondi. She of muted colours, blown out highlights, unstable camera and obsessive cutting.
DeK has hooked up 3 videos I hadn’t encountered before, but left out the more obvious ones, which you should definitely check out for the full Floria Day experience.
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Sounds great! I’m completely sick of buying, labelling and especially rewinding tapes - it feels so ridiculous - and while the 
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