One of my most important requirements for an effective working environment is pixels. The more I have, the more efficiently I can work. Starting in the days when dual-outputs required having an AGP and a PCI card working in tandem, and eventually bringing in multiple computers controlled via Synergy (on CDM) I’ve steadily upgraded to the point where I currently have 6560 pixels of desktop-width in front of me, spread over 3 machines.

The current biggest and brightest is a BenQ G2400W. After purchasing my first HD video camera, I spent several months looking for a reasonably priced monitor with HDMI input and the requisite 1920×1080 pixels to allow me to get a 1:1 HD preview. The G2400 was the first monitor I found with these specifications priced under AU$500 (around US$400).

Prior to picking it up, my biggest monitor was a Phillips 21″ CRT. It pushes out a respectable 1920×1440 pixels, and pushes down a reasonably frightening 28Kg. At its highest resolution, those pixels start getting a little small. I’m happy with lots of tiny text on screen, but few other people can use my setup on that monitor without squinting and leaning close enough to hear the photons bouncing off their epidermis. Upgrading from a CRT to an HD LCD gave me just about as many pixels, but much more clarity, more readable text, and considerably less flickering.

mememamo writes in with his audio visual synthesizer exploration project, Visual Space Music.

Visual Space Music is an interactive audio visual installation created in Max/MSP and Ableton Live. It explores the possibilities of space based audio arrangement and mixing. The user navigates through the virtual space, moving through and manipulating audio/visual synthesis objects, creating anything from abstract virtual soundscapes to precise rhythmic space music.

Using a joystick and knob/fader based midi controller, the user navigates through the virtual space, while moving knobs manipulates each synthesis object, controlling how the object sounds and looks in realtime.

Movement in the space can both affect the arrangement of a composition (using space instead of traditional time-based methods) and also the surround mix. The object sounds project from the direction they are in, manipulated by the user’s exploration of the space.

Visual Space Music Introduction (HD) from Ian McKinlay on Vimeo.

There’s extensive software and hardware information on the project site. I’m especially loving the use of Ikea rear projection screens!

Audience from Chris O’Shea on Vimeo.

Chris O’Shea and rAndom International have completed a lovely installation at the Royal Opera House (UK). 64 mirrors move, each distinctively, to follow moving attendees who catch their “attention.” The installation is powered by Chris’ custom code and rAndom’s hardware and circuits, build on C++, OpenFrameWorks, and Intel’s ubiquitous open source computer vision library OpenCV.

I really enjoy how elegant the resulting design is, and the way it fragments the faces of viewers in a sea of mirrors, bobbing around with simulated intelligence.

Audience for Deloitte Ignite Festival [Project Page, Chris O’Shea]

I expect this could inspire other computer vision projects, or motorized screen concepts in place of mirrors.

Here’s what the video analysis software interface looks like:

See also: other photos of Audience on Flickr

Filament @ Tyneside Cinema Launch - The Wall from Steve Holmes on Vimeo.

Dan Shiffman’s Run Lola Run creation, built in Processing, appears here at Tyneside Cinema in the UK. This is how to watch a movie: 1400 frames on screen at a time. Cuts cascade across the screen, colors shift as the in-frame palette changes, and Lola’s action turns into sculptural wallpaper.

There’s no better time to mention that Dan’s Most Pixels Ever library is getting some fall semester refreshes, with new documentation and other improvements. If you haven’t used it before, this is your ticket to working on Processing with multiple displays – even if it’s just, you know, like two displays.

http://code.google.com/p/mostpixelsever/

Oh, and incidentally, it is Shiffman, not Shiftman.

Looks like Tyneside made a nice launch event for this Filament event. I love the shadows walking in the windows and colored lights. I’ve been talking with visualists lately about improving the quality of live events. Really turning something into an event, and making a visual splash on the outside of the venue, is a great way to start.

Filament @ Tyneside Cinema Launch from Steve Holmes on Vimeo.

Decibel Festival :: Thursday Quickie from momo_the_monster on Vimeo.

Ed.: Visualists are constantly looking for better exposure and better fusion with musical events. In the US’ Pacific Northwest, one highlight of the North American calendar year is unquestionably the legendary Decibel Festival. Our own Momo is there, at an event that also attracts the likes of another favorite visualist of ours, Scott Pagano.

Momo sends along this dispatch from Decibel. -PK

Low depth of field, high frame rate, high resolution. These are the technical hurdles which have traditionally separated consumers from creating film-quality video. HD video has been within consumer reach for quite a while now. 2008 has already seen high frame rates fall to Casio, and in the last couple of weeks, both Canon and Nikon have announced Digital SLRs that will be able to shoot HD video. Obviously real digital cinema cameras have some technical advantages, and there’s that truck full of matteboxes, focus pullers, dollys, cranes and best boys helping the cinema crowd out. But as far as image quality quality goes, the field is just about level.

The larger sensor size and interchangeable lenses of digital SLRs make their image output vastly superior to compact cameras and what we used to call “camcorders”. DSLRs have allowed us to produce stop-motion and time-lapse video with filmic colour, depth of field and resolution, but full motion video of this type was only available by using 35mm adapters (which are bulky and lose light and resolution), or spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on a digital cinema camera.

Canon EOS 5D MKII - $2500

The above video - Reverie by Vincent Laforet (View original in high resolution on Canon’s site) - was shot entirely on the Canon EOS 5D MkII. Apart from resizing the 1080i footage to a resolution reasonable for playing online, there is no colour correction or post-processing trickery involved. To prove this to sceptics, from Friday Canon will be hosting some of the raw clips from the shoot. Without going too overboard: This is completely bananas.

There is also a behind the scenes video, shot with a Canon XH-A1, and it’s frightening to see the output of this current-gen $3300 prosumer HD camera up against the $2700 5D MKII.

Nikon D90 - $1000

Last month, pro shooter Chase Jarvis released a promo video for Nikon, documenting as he and his team tested out their new video-capable prosumer DSLR.

Earlier this week, I talked about some of the consumer-oriented feature improvements in Adobe Creative Suite CS4. But the most interesting development from Adobe is actually more on the developer side. Pixel Bender is a new format for making GPU-accelerated (and CPU multi-threaded) filters, which means fast blends (with different blend modes) and special effects. You can even use it for math operations. Now, whether or not you yourself are able to code these sorts of things, I’m sure we’ll see plenty of filters being passed around online. True, it means dealing with yet another way of creating these filters, but since it operates at a low level, it shouldn’t be too tough to adapt GLSL and other GPU code and techniques for Pixel Bender.

This should be particularly interesting for the open-source, multi-platform, Flash-based VJ tool Onyx, and for adding new, custom effects to your motion graphics arsenal. The filters will run natively in Flash 10 and After Effects CS4, with a plug-in coming to Photoshop.

Kevin Goldsmith at Adobe has been talking a lot about the new release on his blog.

Here’s an especially juicy tidbit from Kevin:

In addition to Pixel Bender Kernels (pbk) and Pixel Bender Bytecode (pbj), there is another Pixel Bender format. Pixel Bender Graphs (pbg). Pixel Bender Graphs are supported directly in After Effects CS4 and the Photoshop Pixel Bender extension. Pixel Bender Graph is an xml-based format that allows you to combine a network of Pixel Bender Kernels into a single effect for WAAAY more powerful filters. We’ll be posting a new version of the toolkit soon that supports the editing of these graphs and we’ll also be posting a specification for them soon on Adobe labs.

They’ve also made available a developer toolkit and even command-line tool. Updated: Kevin notes in comments here:

The Pixel Bender Toolkit has been available on Adobe Labs for almost a year now and anyone can install it and play with the language.

Also, there is a Pixel Bender developer exchange on adobe.com if you are looking for some sample code (although there is tons of stuff now on folks’ blogs).

Of course, that’s what we’ve seen with ActionScript in the past — developers get onboard well in advance of a release, thanks to publicly-available tools, code, and documentation, and then by the time the tool is out a lot of the discussion and examples are coming from developer and not just Adobe. There’s a lesson here for other framework developers (Apple, Sun, others, I’m looking at you).

Gotoandlearn already has a video tutorial on Pixel Bender. (auto-playing QuickTime link)

It’s not entirely revolutionary in that a lot of this does go on behind the scenes in graphics software. What is a big leap is making that functionality accessible to an end user of this kind of software. I think it should also put the pressure on Sun to expose more of this kind of functionality in JavaFX, because it’s clear people want it — and my sense is, like some of the other developer accessibility in CS4, this probably came from popular demand.

Who wants to again declare the GPU is dead? Not … yet, anyway.

For another excellent round-up, see John Nack on Adobe

He notes that Pixelero is already cranking out sample code. (Some of those examples inspire me to try some new techniques in Processing.) Never underestimate the size and passion of the Adobe community, that’s for sure.

Adobe is back with another Creative Suite update, and touting (accurately) “bigness”:

Adobe’s biggest software release to date includes Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design editions, Creative Suite 4 Web editions, Creative Suite 4 Production Premium, Creative Suite 4 Master Collection, as well as 13 point products, 14 integrated technologies and seven services.

So, what’s in there? The big pluses for me, certainly for the kinds of people who read this site, are real motion tools and inverse kinematics in Flash, badly-needed editing tweaks and format support in Premiere, 3D and 2.5D improvements in After Effects, and smarter Photoshop editing. Unfortunately, while companies like Apple and Sony have slashed their prices, Adobe still seems to be betting on a now-burst bubble economy for digital artists, with suite upgrade prices around $600, and confusing, over-complicated bundling (Premium? Web? Production?), despite editorial calls for them to slim down their offerings. (Hey, if it’s making them money, I can’t really argue.)

Here’s a look at some of the feature highlights, which I couldn’t resist following with a word on the Joy of Simplicity — a bit like wanting to stare at a green wall after looking at absurdly bright sunlight:

Metamorphosis from Glenn Marshall on Vimeo.

Glenn Marshall is racking up fans on Vimeo with a new music video. He’s using Processing (site | CDM tag), but he’s built his own animation system and added lovely additive blending (that’s “nebulous” blending, as he puts it). Of course, this is what Processing excels at: you can assemble your own toolkit of creative tools, even without a lot of coding background. I bristle every time I hear people argue that tools like Adobe After Effects are “easy” while Processing is “hard”; easy might be a stretch for either one, but I think it can be a lot easier to build just what you need — and a massive, heavyweight motion graphics tool requires a lot of learning, too, in the reverse direction (top down instead of bottom up).

For his part, Glenn notes that:

• it took about 4 hours to render at HD Ed.: Okay, damn — guess real-time is out of the question here, huh?
• was made entirely using processing.org
• i could have tweaked it manually to make it more intersting, but i like the fact it’s 100% generative
• i can just about understand my own source code, let alone others, i’m still a noob programmer believe it or not.

So there you have it — this is the creation of a beginning programmer. And it looks absolutely gorgeous, I think probably because he focused on his artistic skills and design sense and wasn’t afraid to bring in some assets. He writes on his blog:

‘Butterfly’, my first film and the inspiration behind my whole direction as an artist (check out previous blog), is again the inspiration here. When making Butterfly I became obsessed with the wing patterns of the Monarch butterfly and how they looked like imaginary worlds within themselves, where butterflies lived and died according to a holistic, natural mechanism of nature.

These kind of ambitious concepts where difficult for me to implement back then within the practical limits of traditional 3d/2d software. So I wanted Metamorphosis be symbolic of my passing over into 100% programmed/generative computer art, where perhaps these kinds of ideas can reach more of their potential.

Metamorphosis [butterfly.ie]

Click through video to Vimeo for HD-quality playback. Music by Boards of Canada … yeah, my one gripe is, if you’re doing work this beautiful, go find a musician to collaborate with. I think you’ll get plenty of volunteers! And there’s even Creative Commons-licensed music to discover, as well. Entirely too much ripping off going on, and it doesn’t have to be that way. (Hey, I can’t run the site Create Digital Music and not say something!)

Previous work, same artist: Music is Math

Today Neuros announced the availability of developer kits for their new HD recorder, the OSD 2.0, which can record 720p video via HDMI and component input. At 10″ x 10″ x 2″ and $250/each, this box looks to be a promising candidate for a cheap, portable recorder that you could carry to every gig, something that I’ve been looking forward to. You can check out the full specs here. These are developer kits, not retail units, so we’ll have to wait and see whether this will deliver on its specs. Ed.: I will say, Neuros has done a great job in the past. -PK

Pros:

• HD recording on the cheap.
• User-installed 3.5″ HDD so, unlike previous Neuros devices, you’re not stuck recording to SD cards and you can swap in a new drive when needed.
• 1080i upscaling on output.
• Smaller than a laptop and easy to bring along.
• Wide variety of playback codecs supported, including RTSP, so one could conceivably play back live streams over the Internets via the Ethernet port.
• Cheap!
• Hackable! These boxes are meant to be user-pwned to the nth degree, unlike practically every other DVR on the market.

Cons:

• No video pass-through support and the SD and HD outputs will be mutually exclusive, which means you’ll have to have bring along a DA, too.
• No on-screen display might make it difficult to start the recorder and *know* that it’s on.
• No HDMI input.

Unknowns:

• Recording quality. The specs say “up to 720p/XGA (1024×768) MPEG4 encoding + AAC/AC3/MP3 encoding” and “up to D1(720×480) H.264 encoding + AAC/AC3/MP3 encoding”. I look forward to seeing some sample recordings.
• Just what one can run on its embedded Linux OS. It would be pretty cool if you could fire up PureData on there.

Open set-top box ships [Linux Devices]
Neuros Technology, makers of open source video goodness

Ed.: Note that if you don’t need HD and want something much smaller, Neuros’ OSD remains interesting as an alternative; you can just hook it up to your mixer, etc. Anyone doing that, in fact? -PK

Update: Wait a second… 720p != 1024×768, which I forgot to mention until vade’s comment reminded me. What gives? Where did the marketing department get those 256 pixels from?