I know that just about any piece of visual hardware, (and much of the software we use too) is capable of feedback, but I haven’t encountered anything quite like this before. A lot of the look reminds me of Fairlight effects.
I’ve amassing a bit of a collection, so if there’s interest I’ll package it up as a feedback VJ loop pack.
I’m sure this is one of those tools which almost everyone knows about, but it’s useful enough that I’d post it if only a single person benefited: Perian is a component for which adds native Quicktime support for, notably, FLV (and a bunch of other formats nobody really cares about).
This means you can play those downloaded FLV files in VDMX, 3L… any software which uses the Quicktime framework for playing video (feel free to chime in with the ones I’ve missed). So now you can youtube VJ in your favorite software.
The insanely wonderful crew at Sheffield, UK’s Universal Everything send along a lovely new project – just in time to help ease any unpleasant thoughts about air travel. As part of an installation for Nokia, Universal Everything created a series of projected animations. My favorite is this generative visual of people of different shapes and sizes being whisked along by a people mover (click through to Vimeo for the full HD versions):
A procession of diverse characters glide by on a travelator - friends, families, kids, lovers, rugby teams, fat couples, thin models - celebrating the diversity of people seen at Heathrow T5. Every character riding the travelator is unique, using generative software to create an ever-growing population.
Perhaps I need a mobile version I can take with me through less-lovely airports or during gate hold delays.
It’s really brilliant stuff, and demonstrates that the aesthetics of generative visuals can cover quite a gamut. But by now, I’m bet you’re already wondering what’s powering the very-nice physics interactions, built in Processing. I’m a big fan of the traer.physics library for Processing, but you won’t get results like this — in fact, part of what I like about traer.physics is that it’s often unpredictable once you set up a dynamic system! Processing virtuoso toxi had the same experience, so he adapted a different approach to physics via a technique called Verlet integration, what is commonly seen in "ragdoll physics" and cloth. It’s a technique prized for its relative stability, which the alternative Euler physics techniques tend to lack. (Darnit, I wish I paid more attention in math class, but that’s another story.)
Toxi has been building his own library. Bits of it are on toxiclibs on Google Code, although there’s a little reorganization going on over there so I don’t see a download. I’m half tempted to try implementing this just to better understand what’s going on under the hood. Anyone offer hourly math tutorials? I can barter. I could teach you to make really good burgoo and mint juleps.
Here’s another example of Toxi testing the library, which contains some other visualizations that let you see better how the physics algorithms work:
Peter and I have been having a serious love-in with Sony’s Vegas Video editing software this year. I’m a long-time Premiere user, but it hasn’t been getting a look in since I realised just how much faster it is for me to edit video with Vegas. I’ve had my eyes opened to the flow. Vegas lets you make edits, rearrange, delete, fade, and layer clips without interrupting playback. As a VJ, of course I’m used to “editing live”, so when I tried to go back to the play-stop-edit-play workflow of Premiere, it felt completely unnatural and archaic.
The one thing I’ve been missing is the tight integration between Premiere and After Effects. Vegas has some reasonably capable post-production tools, but as soon as things got beyond simple colour-correction or pan and scan, I would reach for After Effects, and things would get messy - exporting uncompressed AVIs, multi-layer exports… Unpleasant for everyone involved.
So, Peter and I were counting the ways we love Vegas, and I remarked that “if Vegas could save a file which could be imported in to AFX for post-production - absolute bliss”. I quickly followed this up with “it’s never going to happen”, and started to theorize about converting Vegas project files into XML to be then hacked into Premiere, while clicking around Vegas in a hopeful manner.
Everything is entirely camera driven and realtime. Originally started this app in processing, but realized I needed as much power as possible so switched to C++ / OpenFrameworks. Not using the GPU as much as I’d liked due to time restraints, v2 will be fully GPU hopefully ;)
Anyone going to Glastonbury? Drop in and play Memo’s piano for us. Working on your own (little!) project? Contact form’s to the right.
this person is
better than us :D
when the revolution comes
and the whole world goes mad max
we’ll be dead
and this person will be hacking the computers to fight the robot army
This is my contribution to the realtime 4 kilobytes visuals (usually known as “4k intro”) competition for Inspire 2008 (held in Spain). It is a set of spheres with radious controlled by the Fourier Transform (without the “fast”) of the music. it contains some realtime ambient occlusion and depth of field. It’s done in C, using shaders (GLSL). Once again, it all fits in a 4 kilobytes executable (music, animation, rendering engine and effects).
CDM’s Most Eligible Bachelor 2008, Adam Buxton (who is indeed married), had the pilot of his new TV show - MeeBox - playing on BBC3 last night, so it’s now available to people inside the UK, and nobody else. However, Adam has posted some clips on YouTube:
Beautifully simple, effective, cheap-arse post production. Hopefully the full version of MeeBox will appear somewhere online soon.
(For more Adam, check out Radiohead, Spoon, and camping and racing on Dermott’s Sporting Buddies [Parts 1, 2, 3, 4])
It’s a small release number, but I expect Modul8 users will want to pay attention to this one. New in 2.5.5 are various fixes and improvements, most notably restoring Flash SWF support removed from QuickTime. I hope other VJ apps will be able to do the same.
Read on in the forum, and you can find the fix that allowed GarageCUBE to restore Flash support: "Modul8 is using the Flash plugin of Safari, so you could load any file that loads in Safari. " Now, that sounds to me like even Java/Processing support could happen via the same hack. Any takers?
Let us know how the update works for you, ye Modul8 users.
CDMotion contributor vade has posted the first release of his v002 Screen Capture tool, which allows video from the screen (including video, 3D — anything output to OpenGL) to be routed between applications. It all happens on the GPU, which means it’s very, very fast. In vade’s words:
v002 Screen Capture allows you to capture your desktop, or a portion of it to a texture and further process it. This can be used to bring in other applications output or windows as a source input to VDMX or other Quartz Composer compatible patch hosts.
Screen Capture is fully GPU accelerated, and therefore is very fast.
Sample Processing, 3L, Modul8, Jitter, GEM, or any application, and mix them in VDMX, or your Quartz Composer patch host of choice.
Right now, the release is Quartz Composer and Mac-only. (Quartz Composer plug-in support means it’ll also drop nicely into software like VDMX.) But there’s an open call to port this to other environments (Pd, Max/MSP/Jitter, Processing, and such). It may even be possible to replicate the basic technique on another operating system, though the implementation would have to be reconsidered.
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2008-Jun-29@09:35
CDMotion contributor vade has posted the first release of his v002 Screen Capture tool, which allows video from the screen (including video, 3D — anything output to OpenGL) to be routed between applications. It all happens on the GPU, which means it’s very, very fast. In vade’s words:
