DVCreators has put up a half an hour tutorial on Quartz Composer detailing how they have created their introduction graphics:
I’ve always liked the super-dramatic light rays effect, but the light rays filters in Motion and Final Cut Pro take too long to render… and frankly, they are pretty lame. So I’ve been waiting for the right opportunity to help you create those super long, awesome godlike light rays, and preferably in real time! And finally, that opportunity is here.
So if you have some time to burn and have been putting off digging in to one of the nicest DIY visuals environments, head on over to DVCreators.net and get your learn on.
The release was original mainly CD Audio only at the time as general release formats didn’t allow for an AV album. All the visuals were made at the same time, basically the the visuals is the music and here for the first time is all the video album in one place::::::
Skip to 3:19 for a truly brilliant mashup moment, which appears at 3:27. Then watch it from the beginning. I can only imagine how difficult this was to create using the technology available in 1995.
Musicians have thousands of years of history when it comes to interfaces and instruments, but visuals are relatively new. Little wonder, then, that visualists are eager to try new interfaces to help make visuals akin to performance instruments. Or, in less lofty terms, let’s get Wii remote wagging in the club tonight.
Over on createdigitalmusic.com, we’re celebrating Game Day — basically, I’m squeezing as many game-related posts into 24 hours, because a whole bunch of tips came in at once. A couple of Wii-related controller solutions jumped out.
Wii + Flash
MoteDaemon = Flash (and Flex, and AIR) + Wii, on Mac. On Windows, look to WiiFlash.org. (I imagine it wouldn’t be hard to modify your code to use one or the other on each respective platform if you want to develop cross-platformly.
Getting hardware control in Adobe Flash requires some work: basically, you need a client-server model. The good news is, there are already two Wii-specific solutions out there.
Pretty soon, people are cooking up Minority Report demos with Flash (using Papervision for 2.5D-style 3D in Flash’s 2D world, and Open Dynamics Engine for physics):
I’d loved to see this coupled with something like Onyx for an all-Wii, all-Flash performance app. With Flex and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), this could be the basis for some really hard-core, full-blown apps … though you will be limited by Flash’s slower performance, at least in comparison to C/C++-based tools like Max or even Java.
Looks like Linux users are presently out of luck, unless I’m missing something (feel free to chime in if you know a cross-platform alternative).
Wii + MIDI, OpenSoundControl (OSC)
For a more app-agnostic solution, you can hook up a Wii to send MIDI or, ideally, OpenSoundControl (OSC) to apps that support it (vvvv, Max, Pd, and hopefully VJ apps soon — I’ve heard a couple of developers working on it).
On Mac, you can send both OSC and MIDI with one app, perfectly-suited to taking data from the Wii controller: OSCulator. OSCulator is a great tool for the Wii, but it also shows promise of what a hardware input hub could generally look like, with open-ended inputs controlling visuals and sound rather than pre-defined, MIDI-style keyboards and knob and faderboxes as have traditionally been used in music.
On PC, GlovePIE is an awesomely-powerful scripting tool for use with Wii and other game devices. I’ve talked about it endlessly before, but I’ll stay quiet — just go. Get it. Enjoy. In fact, with OSCulator on Mac and GlovePIE on Windows, it’s hard not to be insanely happy on either platform.
Another interesting out-of-the-box alternative, though, is the new Wiinstrument. It’s largely geared for playing back drum samples, but it’s not hard to take that metaphor and use those control changes and other MIDI messages as visual controls — especially if you think of your “drum kit” as sets of visual clips (video or other visuals).
This time next week Peter and I will be in Perth, Western Australia, basking in the geekly radiance of ByteMe festival and enjoying the hospitality of the inimitable Kat and Jasper, a.k.a. CDMo favouritesVJZoo.
We don’t have any official panels or workshops planned. Instead we’ll be devoting our time to documenting the goings-on and creative outputs of all the other cool people who are attending the festival.
Aside from catching up with the ArtificialEyes crew and Australian Visualist extrordinaire Jean Poole, this festival will be especially exciting for CDM as it’s the first time Peter and I get to meet In Real Life! Will we still get along after our fleshy casings have shared a continent? Will the CDM empire crumble as we discover that we’re not really interested in writing about CreatingDigitalThings? Watch this space to find out.
After the festival concludes on the 9th of December Peter will accompany me back to Brisbane for CDM Summit ‘07, where we’ll discuss the future of CDM, work on CreatingDigitalStuff, and probably play quite a lot of Strikers.
Leisure time aside, we don’t really have anything concrete organized, so if any CDM readers will be in Brisbane between 9-14th December and are interested in an informal get together, or would like to catch up at ByteMe festival, make with the comments.
Ed.: If you happen to be coming to Perth, or know folks who live there (and really, who among us doesn’t have lots of friends in Perth), be sure to sign up for events! Many require an RSVP. And if you can’t make it to Perth, we’ll make the virtual experience as rich as possible! -PK
Non-Pro MacBooks: Still Incompatible with Boot Camp for Analog Video Out? -
Okay, Leopard users — we’re interested to hear more video output results as people upgrade. We got some good news earlier this month in that MacBook Pros (with both NVIDIA and ATI graphics cards) now properly support analog video output running under Windows on Leopard’s Boot Camp. That’s nifty, of course. But what about non-Pro MacBooks? We’ve heard at least one reader report that says that sync problems still stop MacBook users from sending analog (S-Video / composite) video when booted into Windows via Base Camp. (It’s too bad, as I actually enjoy the MacBook dongle for its ability to output S-Video and composite outputs simultaneously.)
Wikipedia now makes reference to the problem, as well — minus a citation, so if anyone has a proper citation for this, we’d love to hear it:
There is partial support for Apple’s combined S-video and composite video adapter for TV-out. Some Macs with an ATI graphics chip are compatible as long as the system is booted with the cable in place, yet many have had trouble getting the S-video image to sync properly from the Boot Camp side while using the 2007 aluminum iMacs, regardless of how the ATI resolution and refresh rate is set.
Anyone have test results?
Wondering why you’d want to run Windows on a Mac? How about the ability to play with Windows-only Flash development tools (yay, Flashdevelop), vvvv, Java 6, Microsoft’s XNA gaming framework, and Resolume? See 28 comments of ideas from our last post (and MacBook Pro users can have at these already):
Pimp my mobile Quartz Composer ‘Book: this shot by Flickrer qlc demonstrates just how attached some Mac visualists are to Quartz Composer. But with security protections, is every QC composition an island? Good news: there’s a fix.
Quartz Composer gurus have had to face challenges bringing in network data: the problem is, to keep Quartz Compositions secure, Apple has largely crippled networking features. Celso Martinho has been hacking QC to make networking work in Leopard, and has a functional solution. He wrote us to tip us off on a detailed post at his blog.
First, if you’re still on Tiger, good news:
I needed a way to get data from the Network in the form of events that I could reuse in a quartz composition. So our resident mac programmer coded this custom made patch based on sparse non official documentation found on the internet. And it worked great. We have about 5 plasma screens with mac minis over at work running it for months, no problems whatsoever.
But while Leopard finally offered an official means of making your own patches (that’s what the rest of the patching world calls “objects”, Max/MSP, vvvv, and Pd users), Leopard also breaks their custom patch. Solution?
Then I found 2 patches in the new “Network” category: Network Broadcaster and Network Receiver. They are meant to connect several qtz compositions across the network and exchange messages between them. But maybe I can use them for something else…
I wrote a quartz composition to broadcast messages using UDP and multicast and started debugging and I discovered that the packets are really simple non-crippled text messages, four bytes per character iso-latin encoded chunks.
If you’re doing heavy-duty networking, I’d still investigate other alternatives to make sure Quartz Composer is your best choice. Processing and Max/MSP/Jitter both make short work of UDP send/receive, thanks to Java’s natural abilities there, as do objects in vvvv, Pd, and the like. Even Flash has some data features, with a little work. On the other hand, QC has some natural tricks of its own, and for multi-machine setups, the combination of this hack with QC’s new multi-computer features is very sweet indeed.
Full details, plus a PHP script that does the dirty work, here:
The Oculon Pocket Projector Pro 920 and 1440 are.. well.. actual pocket projectors. Available in December the tiny projectors pack 640×480 VGA for the 920 ($299) and 800×600 SVGA for the 1440 ($399), and literally fit in the palm of your hand. The 1440 sports both composite and VGA (D-SUB 15 pin) inputs connections, while the 920 supports only composite RCA. Both have optional SD card slots and Mpeg4 video playback - which could prove fun.
Obviously, there is a catch - or two. The specs on the product pages seem a bit inconsistent, with the 1440 mentioning 250 lumens (yes, two hundred and fifty), while the 950s spec only quoted at 25 (yes, two hundred and fifty divided by ten. That was not a typo on my part at least). The suggested throw at one meter being a diminutive 24 inches. Still, they could prove quite fun. Oculon mentioned a portable battery pack for the projector. Can anyone say head mounted projector?
Updated: the specs currently show 50 lumens for the 1440, as you can see on the product page. We received a correction via Ariel Chen from Oculon. Note that while that lumen level is relatively low for projection, there are still a number of applications for which this could be a really fun tool. -Ed.
Stores like iTunes (and all those Windows Media-based alternatives, if anyone ever uses them) aren’t just the domain of major labels. Indie artists and smaller labels are finding their way onto these services, courtesy the power of distributors and other conduits. (For music, tools like CD Baby have been a big boon.)
But part of the potential of all of this technology was supposed to be video content as well as music. TuneCore has stepped up to the plate with a beta service that lets artists sell music videos via iTunes. Many artists, I suspect, will prefer to use videos as promotional tools only, but what’s nice here is you get iTunes to cover bandwidth for higher-quality downloads and get a little revenue stream, to boot. TuneCore explains the arrangement:
Delivery of the video will be completed with a flat, upfront fee paid to TuneCore and, as always, TuneCore customers receive 100% of the revenue from the sale of their music in a non-exclusive agreement that they can cancel at any time.
Here’s one example, a music video from Grammy winner Ziggy Marley, “Love is My Religion”, now available for purchase via TuneCore. (And I expect this could be commonplace: promote on YouTube, sell on iTunes, etc.)
John Hutchinson pointed us to this hack a day post about a new projector calibration system. Skip to minute 3:00 in the video to see the applications for multiple projections and non-rectangular, curved surfaces. It uses embedded light sensors in the projection surface and software — no projector hacks — and was created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon (pdf), Stanford, and Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs. Not only could this be a huge timesaver for groups like the Circus of Now, the time saved could be used to get really ambitious and experimental with your projection design.
Hard Drive Mortality Rates: When to Replace Those Old Drives -
Hard drives are the skeleton and lifeblood of digital video. Musicians and other audio-botherers seem constantly amazed by the amount of space required for DV and especially HD-Video projects (with uncompressed HD capture inhabiting an entirely different level), while my video-based friends seem to be ever carrying around stacks of Firewire or USB hard drives for capturing and storing their collections of media.
So a large study of which drives fail most often and when drives are most likely to fail would be of great use to the visualist community. Fortunately, Google - possibly the largest purveyor of hard drive genocide the world has ever known - has run a study covering 5 years and over 100,000 drives, and the results have been condensed by Dan:
You know how mechanics put a little sticker in the corner of your windscreen to remind you when your car will need another service? Hard drives should come with something similar.
Because, one way or another, all hard drives are going to die.
Personally, I start feeling nervous about my drives when they hit their second birthday. Since they’ve then spent almost all of those two years cheek-by-jowl with other drives in the disk-farm PCs I favour, this is not entirely irrational. But, thanks to a couple of recent studies, I now know that it’s less rational than I thought it was.
Google’s study of more than a hundred thousand drives over five years is useful as much for what it says about how hard it is to figure this stuff out, as for what it actually found.
It turns out that working drives hard, or running them warmer than recommended, doesn’t seem to have much of an impact on their life. And the popular idea that failures follow a “bathtub curve”, in which any drive that doesn’t die in the first three months is likely to live for five years, also seems to be invalid. Drives actually just slowly wear out over their lives, like other mechanical devices.
Dan’s writeup is aimed at geeks in general, but I don’t see anything there which isn’t perfectly reasonable and applicable to my geek specialty.
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This time next week Peter and I will be in Perth, Western Australia, basking in the geekly radiance of 
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2007-Nov-25@20:32
