It’s been a couple of months since Peter mentioned MachineCollective - the open, DIY modular controller enclosure system - on CDMu, and they haven’t been sitting on their hands during that time. MachineCollective.org has been updated with lots of new pictures and information, and they’ve even dropped a potential price point: €25-35.
Despite a couple of visualist-specific controllers - Ohm, VMX VJ, NuVJ - we generally have to make our controller choices from the gear designed for electronic musicians. We see a lot of inventive combinations of hardware and software solutions for VJing, but we also need some good, accessible, basic setups to actually get new people in to performing live visuals. We need more hardware, which means we need more people making prototypes, some of which will eventually become commercial solutions for the next generation.
Generative works from Keith Peters, on his new Art from Code site.
As code literacy improves and coding tools like Processing and Flash make it easier to produce stunning visual results, the line between the coder/hacker and digital artist, and more conventional artists, is blurring fast. The next trend: networks and blogs on which people share not just their work, but the code behind it. The idea is old, but there’s no question the breadth of content and number of participants is expanding - and beginners are welcome, too.
The Flash Virtuoso, and Galleries vs. Code Repositories
Keith Peters, aka BIT-101, has been instrumental in the Flash community in advocating digital art and animation. His books are clearly written and intuitive to non-programmers — despite their Flash basis, I’ve found them useful for my Processing experiments, too. And Keith has been busy of late. He’s got a second installment coming for his wonderful Making Things Move book, inspiring his isometric experiments pictured here, and he’s also launched a new site called “Art from Code.” (Various permutations of this theme come up regularly.)
I owe a huge debt to Keith, as I got into generative coding entirely through his books, before later going on to discover Processing.
Interestingly, the relationship between code and art is an imperfect one. Just open sourcing the code isn’t always practical. In a way, though, that makes the code even more beautiful — and sometimes sharing visual results can be just as interesting as sharing code. (It forces us to go back and try to reproduce the results, then get it all wrong, and wind up producing something original, often as a result of mistakes!)
Ed.: The JOGL changes are a big deal; I’m curious to see what improvements this may cause in render quality via the OpenGL renderer. Processing is nearing its real (non-beta!) 1.0 release, so expect a full-blown update on the progress of the tool soon; see Ben Fry’s recently-posted status report. -PK
What kind of rig will you be taking to Vienna? Computers? Hardware? Software?
A mixture of all three! It took us days to figure out exactly what was required, to be able to do exactly what we need to be doing, as it’s quite an unusual task we’re undertaking, especially the audiovisual sampling of live streams that you’ve actually no idea what exactly they’ll be until they happen!
This just isn’t a normal gig set up and no equipment exists to do exactly what’s needed. Ideally, we’d like some huge Grass Valley multi-channel mixer that takes everything from SDI to Y/C and their Turbo recorder or similar, but the audio side of this kind of kit simply doesn’t work in the same way as DJ kit and certainly doesn’t have audio effects, or appropriate video effects for that matter.
So central to our set-up will be one of Pioneer’s new SVM-1000 audio/visual mixers. We worked with Pioneer on the development of the SVM, from conceptual ideas to the testing of the early prototype - so it’s good to be pushing it’s capabilities outside of the club environment. We’ll also be using our own customised Edirol V4 video mixer that’s been modified to take audio, and we’ll use it to shrink the picture and do further overlays; allowing us to have two live images side-by-side, using our laptop running VJammPro - which is essentially an AV sequencer and clip triggering software (which can also shrink the picture live too); we’ll also capture footage on this laptop from any of the live feeds and place the clips in VJammPro. And to complete the set-up we’ll have three DVJ-1000’s - Pioneer’s DVD turntables, and a DJM-1000, which is a six channel audio mixer plus it’s effects unit, the EFX-1000. Oh and ten tonnes of cables, connectors and video monitors!
Addictive TV’s Modified Edirol V4. Image by artificialeyes
How many concurrent feeds will you have access to?
We’ll be getting six live feeds, and I think it’ll be a mixture of live cameras from the same event and at other times different events coming down at the same time.
Neon is among the best of a breed of obscure, indie VJ software gems around the world. The creation of mac/xplsv.com and later shine/xplsv.com, it’s made a mark not only as a VJ performance app but as a creator of real-time motion demos. It can event manipulate 3D Studio Max 7 scenes in real-time. All of this goodness could simply die as the developer moves on, but instead shine has decided to open source the code. That gives this Windows-only software a shot at a port to Mac and/or Linux, and turns it into a playground for would-be visual programmers, even if they just want to dabble in filter creation. And it gives the rest of us a lovely tool to add to our toolbox, free.
The feature set is pretty tasty:
Layered effects: 10 effects layers (called FX instead of layers, oddly), with various blend modes, and a master effects channel - a really nice, practical architecture
Real-time 3D with 3DS Max support, pixel shaders, vertex shaders (all apparently on DirectX, so some work would be needed for Linux, Mac, and OpenGL)
Flexible formats: DirectShow, ffmpeg codec support, image support, SWF, live video capture
Endless filters: Included filters, custom filters using pixel shaders, and a filter SDK with Virtual C++ examples. FreeFrame support, too, though not FFGL (yet) - Resolume has the win for FFGL support so far
Live control, beat sync: The “beat manager” is the most insane part of this — and why this might find its way into your toolset. You have elaborate control of how things are synced to the beat, with even DJ-style pitch bend controls and per-element sync of parameters in your project. There’s also FFT (sound-reactive input) control, and MIDI.
Programmers can have at the SVN repository right away. Non-programmers get something special for free. I doubt this will shake your loyalty for your existing performance tool of choice, as a visual creation tool you’ll want to check out some of the cool 3D demos done, like this award-winning xplsv.com video, “Sound Pressure.”
(Edit: Auto-playing video moved after the jump - Jaymis)
As it happens, interlacing is not a diabolical technology invented just to make your life miserable by creating those annoying Venetian Blind patterns on digital videos. (Who knew?)
The wonderful people of Videopia don’t just explain interlacing – they defend it, starting with its early history. Then they explain how to deal with removing interlacing in the progressive-scan world of Internet distribution. And if you’re still not clear on when that horizontal pattern of lines on your video is a good thing and when it’s a bad thing, this will make it clear.
It’s by far the single best explanation I’ve seen, and they’ve done it all with fantastic production values.
Now if people will just watch the darned thing, maybe we won’t see all this poor deinterlacing in online videos on YouTube. (Stats were surprisingly low when this came online, so have at it, Visualist Nation, and spread the love around!)
Any further tips (or questions) to add to their interlacing advice, ye tech-savvy visualists? Let us know in comments.
Updated: Richard Lainhart writes with a still-better technique. I agree, absolutely - got so distracted by the elegant explanation of interlacing itself and its history that I neglected to pay as much attention to what they were actually suggesting! Of course, this won’t work in all cases, meaning you’re back to the video technique. But since a lot of you have cameras capable of shooting as Richard describes, this could be helpful.
The deinterlacing techniques mentioned in the video all will introduce artifacts of some sort in the image. If you use leave the fields in, you’ll still see interlace combing on the edges of objects in motion, even if the frame isn’t paused. Interpolated interlacing can be better, but you’ll still often see blockiness, sawtooth effects, or other such artifacting on straight lines and hard-edged objects, as no interpolation method is perfect.
If you can, you’ll get better results with this method - shoot everything in full 1080i HDV, and reduce the frame to one-half resolution in After Effects. When you bring the HDV footage into AE, convert it to square pixels but tell AE to not deinterlace it (in the Interpret Footage dialog.) Then scale that image to half-size in a 960×540 comp. This has the effect of throwing out every other field and reducing the frame to widescreen SD format, and you’ll get perfect, clear progressive full frames. From there, crop to 4:3 for standard SD, or scale up to 1280×720 for 720P HD - scaling the image up in AE will introduce some softness, but it will still look better than 720i footage when viewed on a computer screen.
All the footage on my YouTube site was processed this way, and none of it has any visible field artifacting.
If you speak Spanish, you’ll find this to be an invaluable set of resources. If you don’t, you’ll simply enter a hacking wonderland with some mysterious images and videos and (even with no knowledge of the language) still some very handy links.
Among their accomplishments so far: a DIY multi-touch rig controlling Processing and Max/MSP (with MaxLink handling communication between the two).
And for those of you who prefer hardware, here’s the Numark Total Control working in concert with Apple’s free visual patching environment Quartz Composer. Live generative 3D visuals, ho! If you’re a Total Control owner, the blog post has complete details with screen shots and JavaScript scripts that do all the important translation work.
Friend of CDMo Suryummy shares this audiovisual motion sequence, imagining what the world would be like if you cooked … in … outer space.
Good stuff. And no, The Frugal Gourmet hasn’t been dropping acid. (Suryummy does suggest that this could be Bowie with a cooking show, which I like.) But Suryummy does share his tools:
Maya
Adobe CS3
Particular
Ableton Live
Native Instruments Reaktor
Native Instruments Absynth
Tasty. Keep those videos from vimeo (and elsewhere) coming.
At some point we need to go over what a workflow would be like doing this kind of thing in a live tool like Processing. It’s tricky, and of course necessitates some sacrifices in the visual category to allow for real-time performance – but it can be rewarding. (And there’s no saying you can’t do both.)
Seeing as a lot of what I’m doing is based on open-source software and the good intention of others, I think its fair that I release some source code too… So I’ve tried to clean and comment a bit of the code I used on the psychedelic interactive fluid and particles demo (also used on the Glastonbury 2008 PI Installation.
With the Olympics opening ceremony coming up, I’m sure there are some visualists right now in Beijing preparing for one of the biggest performances of their lives. Since 2004, generative video and projection mapping has come a long way, so I’m expecting we might see something completely bonkers in the next 12 or so hours.
I’m sure it’s no surprise to CDM readers that I’m not super keen on “outside“. It takes quite a lot of effort to get me in to a sporting mood, and AddictiveTV seem to have done the trick with their hyper-kinetic sampling techniques on this material for Adidas.
As reported by Coolhunting: This piece will be part of Adidas’ “Sport in Art” exhibition, at the Today Art Museum in Beijing for the games. Addictive TV will also be remixing live feeds of the games “for an Austrian television network”.
And if that’s not enough to get you in the mood for sport, then maybe some explosions will be more your speed.
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2008-Aug-18@01:53
