Peter posted last week about Flight of the Conchords’ new video.

For additional CDMo flavour, Toolfarm have an interview with the visual effects gurus for this clip, talking about the shoot, with lots of motion tracking and colour correction thrown in:

Michele: The job involved tracking the stunt double’s heads with the singer’s heads. I noticed tracking dots on the stunt double’s cheeks, nose and chin in your photos. Jemaine and Bret were shot against a greenscreen and with a green cape. How did you get it to match? Can you talk a bit about the process of tracking and rotoscoping and matching angles?

Dave: This was a very tedious process that had to planned out for the entire video factoring in the limitations we were facing. We had placed tape on the doubles faces for reference as to how their heads rotated and twisted. We made sure to keep our doubles aware of what was happening in each shot, but allowing them room to perform their stunts.

Dave: Some of the takes were really wild and crazy and we would have to come in and tone down the movement a little to make sure we were going to able to recreate the same move on the greenscreen with Bret and Jemaine. The most difficult part was getting Bret and Jemaine to match these moves and be able to maintain lip-sync. On set (greenscreen) we would run each guy through individually and have them watch a monitor playing back the footage from the shoot. This footage was played back, mirrored in some cases, and slowed down to 50%. This gave the guys a chance to lip sync and get the head movements down.

Check out the full interview on Toolfarm, there’s some fascinating insights there from some obviously talented artists creating big things with a tiny team.

Matthew Applegate sends this our way — it’s like two computers having a conversation, across epochs of computer history. The MacBook Pro is running a computer vision algorithm and "singing" notes based on colors it sees on the Spectrum’s screen.

Maybe this will get your brain thinking of something new — file this under "really odd inspirations."

Visual patchers love the fact that they can create sophisticated stuff just using on-screen patch cords. But when you want to go beyond the capabilities of the default set of objects — and for solving certain problems more elegantly — code is the way to go. Code your own objects, and you get the best of both worlds. So the news that vvvv is adding a facility for easily creating your own objects (or "nodes" as they’re called in vvvv-speak) is good news, indeed. (Jitter and Pd have similar extensibility, though having looked at what’s necessary to write a Jitter object, you may or may not want to … go there. This does look quite a bit easier, for simple tasks, at least.)

Phl shares some additional resources in comments on our previous story, so I want to make sure you don’t miss these.

sourceforge site with the first plugins (go to code -> svn browse)

VVVV Plugin HowTo

Plugin Forum for more questions

Note that you can use any language you like. I do like the open source SharpDevelop they mention here. For any of you who think Windows doesn’t have a fledgling open source community of its own, think again — perhaps because of the glut of working Windows-based programmers, there’s actually quite a lot going, arguably more than on Mac. And C# is a nice language for this kind of task.

Seriously, let us know if you build anything; we’d love to see it!

The successor to ArKaos VJ, a staple in early VJ application history, is nearly here. GrandVJ just hit public beta.

GrandVJ is a complete, from-scratch rewrite of the app, with some new features — but still a nod to the simple, one-screen interface that made the original popular. You can now download a working demo, beta build (with some watermarks on output and other limitations) for both Mac and Windows. I have to say, I like the music keyboard interface and drag-and-drop-everywhere philosophy. At the very least, this could become the beginner-friendly VJ app a lot of people have been looking for. (That is, if it’s successful, I may have an answer for the "where should I start with VJing for something simple — and I don’t have a lot of time" question I get a lot, particularly on the music side.) It’s also got some generative and Flash-playing tricks I’ll be looking into. At the same time, I think it will be worth some constructive criticism. This field is also getting crowded — and users more demanding.

Watch for a more detailed preview from us soon, but in the meantime, you can go ahead and give it a spin and let us know what you think:

ArKaos GrandVJ Public Beta 1 [ArKaos Users Forum]

Previously:

ArKaos Rebuilds VJ Software From Ground Up: GrandVJ

eMotion - Basic particles tool example from Adrien Mondot on Vimeo.

We saw eMotion last year — it’s a Mac OS-based 3D tool for particles and visual effects, with physics modeling, Wacom tablet control, input from sensors and OpenSoundControl, a text engine, and integrated Quartz Composer support. In other words: it’s a friendly tool for making pretty motion imagery, designed to be usable by performers.

Creator Adrien Mondot has new videos up and a beta available for download. (An Intel Mac running Leopard is required.)

eMotion on stage from eMotion for Animation on Vimeo.

More videos, including screencasts on features like forces and Quartz Composer:

Vimeo screencasts

Details on the software and a download link:

eMotion

The description is a bit hyperbolic ("a new way to define movement"?) given that a lot of this is indebted to 1970s "augmented reality" research by Myron Krueger and physics simulations by, well, a lot of people. (Particle systems were specifically invented by Bill Reeves of Pixar in the early 80s. Ahem — Khaaaaaaaaaan!) I don’t think that takes away from the coolness of this — on the contrary, I think acknowledging historical lineage helps demonstrate why the new, accessible, personal rendition of that is valuable. But there is a lot here that’s done very well. It’ll be fantastic to watch it develop.

Likewise, it’s interesting to see these tools (and vvvv, also mentioned today) working with proprietary, platform-specific technologies. There are certainly some advantages to hooking into the Mac’s Core Image and other app development tools (see Quartz Composer, VDMX, etc.), or Windows’ DirectX (as with vvvv). I think the challenge for people interested in open, cross-platform development is to make things just as usable and visually consistent with OpenGL and cross-platform APIs.

The free (for non-commercial use), Windows-only, insanely-powerful visual/multimedia patching environment vvvv just got a killer feature: the ability to make your own "nodes" (what are called objects in some other modular tools).

It’s actually pretty easy to build, too, and the developers have some templates for you. This is way up the list on my summer projects. You can do matrix transforms, as well, so 3D / GPU-based video processing gets very interesting, along with simpler manipulations of color, string, and number values:

The latest vvvv version offers developers an interface to write their own nodes for vvvv. A plugin is basically a .dll file, that can be drag&dropped into a vvvv patch where it appears as a node. If its stored in vvvv’s plugins directory, its even available in the node list.

vvvv gurus, if you give this a try and make something interesting, let us know:

vvvv40beta16 release with plugin interface [Results in Reverse blog]

Calling Portland, Seattle, Vancouver BC and beyond — Momo the Monster has just moved from Los Angeles and the comforting company of the Los Angeles Video Artists to Portland, Oregon.

Join the discussion at nwav.org and shape the future of VJing and AV Performance in the Northwest US. Or at least get together for monthly meetings of screenings, beer drinking and AV Geekery.

My love of time-lapse meshes perfectly with my love of, well, the 5 foot carpet python I share my house with. Having a companion animal (is it politically correct to say “pet” these days?) around is great for any visual artist. More specifically, having Python around an HD, slow-motion capable video camera, well I think that’s a fantastic combination:

I am yet to create any actual “HD” material with this camera, but for web-resolution work it has been an absolute revelation. The ability to shoot a show as a single wide shot from a tripod and then pan and scan in post production means that those previously unexciting “gig documentation” tapes are now actually worth editing. Similarly, if you’re shooting hand-held HD but delivering web resolution you have huge latitude for image stabilization.

For the python dinner I had a couple of DV cameras as backup angles, and the difference in detail is frightening.

We’re all about the cheap, characterful, DIY aesthetic here at CDMo, but sometimes bigger really is better.

CDMo reader Seej has been getting rather DIY projection, with instructions on how to build a portable projector screen, and a DIY projector mount.

I do a lot of projection installations, in unique locations, usually with about zero setup time. When I looked into buying a professional 10’x7’ “fast-fold” screen, I was blown away by how much they cost. Instead, I decided to design my own, using easy to find materials.

The Challenge:
1. Fast to set-up
2. Fits in a cab
3. Front or rear projection
4. Affordable

We’ve seen a similar projector mount before at VJKungFu, but Seej’s version seems to be even easier. A couple of these would have saved countless setup hours for me over the last year.

So, the next step is to make this even cheaper: Does anyone have a source for cheap ball joint heads and clamps?

If you follow CDMu, you might have noticed Peter’s recent Kore@CDM announcement. Today I’m extremely happy to be able to officially launch of our first visual minisite; for the Vixid VJX16-4 video mixer:

Vixid@CDM, http://vixid.noisepages.com

The visualist world is in a real period of growth at the moment, and we think that Vixid are one of the companies who are doing great things to help this growth. From our first moments with a VJX we know that we wanted to spend more time and really get to know it. So we approached Vixid about partnering with CDM to create a site devoted to exploring the VJX16-4, and how it can help our art grow and develop.

How this partnership works: With a tool as deep and flexible as this, the traditional “couple of days or weeks” review loan wouldn’t really work. So Vixid have sent me a VJX16-4 to keep. This will allow me to spend time learning its tricks, trying it in different configurations in both live and studio settings, and to share what I’m learning.
In effect Vixid are paying for this content, but it’s not a “home shopping network advertorial” kind of situation. There will be no hand up the back of my shirt or sanitized autocue telling us what to say. We’ve built vixid.noisepages primarily because we love the mixer, and want it to become part of what we do. Getting paid for writing about it is an added bonus, for everyone really: Readers and users get new information and inspiration on what the VJX can do for their art, Vixid get a resource to help their existing users (or inspire new ones), and I get an amazing new toy to play with to spend some very serious and scholarly time doing educational research with a technologically sophisticated device.

I’m quite aware that some will consider this to be “selling out”. Peter and I have spent a lot of time discussing how we want CDM to progress, and we consider this kind of partnership to be an important part of building the visualist site of the future. We’re aiming to grow CDMo to a point where we can spend more time writing and creating, to document and to help this artform mature, and sponsorship from developers we think are pointed in the right direction is just one part of this plan.

So, rationale aside, what can you expect to see coming up on Vixid.noisepages? I’ll be going through some of the basics, like how to set up, and differences between “traditional” VJ mixers and the “Vixid way”, and more advanced stuff, like using MIDI to do crazy stuff with live inputs, and how to get the Vixid to operate as 2 virtual mixers outputting to separate screens. Oh, and I recently received 16 security cameras in the mail. The Vixid has 16 inputs… that should be interesting.