In code and 3D models, in live visual performance and augmented architecture and dance, in VJ sets and futuristic 3D demos, shows and games, visualism extended to new ways of transforming perception. For just one slice of what happened this year, entirely by the numbers, here are the stories that scored the most page views in 2011 – not necessarily the most significant stories, but those that ranked largest in traffic, which to me is at least an interesting metric in terms of what garners the greatest attention and audience.

Let us know your favorite stories from 2011, too, on CDM or elsewhere. And see where your musical counterparts’ eyeballs went, too, on Create Digital Music.

The countdown to the most-read story starts … now:

10.

Make a Building into an EQ, More MadMapper Projection Mapping Tutorials

While here it ranks at number 9, it’s tough to overstate the importance of projection mapping generally, and the MadMapper tool here – seen even as stories from past years soared to the top readership on the site.

8.

Codify: Elegant, Creative Coding Directly on the iPad – No (Other) Computer Needed

7.

Survey: Which VJ – Visualist Software Do You Use Live?

And the results: What Visual Software Readers Use: Some Clear Favorites, Plenty of Diversity, in Census Results

Summary:
1. Modul8 (28.5%)
2. Resolume Avenue 3 (25.6%)
3. Vidvox VDMX (19.4%)
4. Apple Quartz Composer (19.3%)
5. Max/MSP/Jitter (16%) *
6. Processing (15.4%)
7. vvvv (10.2%)
8. ArKaos GrandVJ (8.4%)
9. Resolume 2.x (8.1%)
10. Isadora (6.9%)
11. OpenFrameworks (5.8%)
12. Pd/GEM (4.3%)

6.

Open Source Match Move: Camera Tracking in Blender, Plus Tutorials on Mac Builds, Compositing

By the way, I ran into a core Blender developer in Eindhoven, NL in November. We’ve got a lot more Blender talking to do in 2012, as this year wraps up with a big new Blender release.

5.

Scanning the Universe in 3D: The Hottest Kinect Video Yet?

4.

Running Live Visuals for The Glitch Mob: An All-Access Pass Behind the Scenes

Probably an easy reader favorite, and certainly one of my favorite stories this year, thanks to Momo’s in-depth reporting of what made the tour tick.

3

New TouchDesigner Goes Gold, with Free Sharing, Ableton Live Sync, More

Side note: clearly one of the tools of the year, TouchDesigner touched many of our biggest stories.

2.

Kinect-Augmented Reality, as Projection Mapping Meets Depth Sensing (Hint: It’s Awesome)

1.

Gameduino is a DIY, Open Source Game Platform Built on Arduino That’s Ridiculously Awesome

Look out, flat 4:3 and 16:9 rectangles. Projection mapping – the simple but potentially-expressive technique of using projected light on more complex three-dimensional surfaces – appears to be here to stay. And it’s even reached Mongolia.

Reader Joe Catchpole writes to let us know about his project, combining Ableton Live with VJ app Modul8, Mac tool Quartz Composer, and others, plus the key ingredient — MadMapper, the 3D projection mapping software.

More details:

Hi, just to let you know about a project I completed with DJ Ulzii in Ulaanbaatar: The First video mapping in Mongolia. 9th of
Sept 2011.

Growth_D Party at iLoft Function House, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.

Created in collaboration between Ulzii Deejay Nergui, Joe Catchpole and a great crew at the venue:
facebook.com/​djulzii
Musical and translation help from:
http://soundcloud.com/crepusculo

Made with 5 Projectors, 2 x TH2G, Quartz Composer, MadMapper, Modul8, Adobe Illustrator and Wings3D. Using Ableton Live to trigger the intro section and then accompany some great DJ’s and lots of energetic dancers until the early hours….

It was an amazing experience out there, never before have I been in demand from TV crews for interviews! We’ll see if any of that makes it
to youtube…hahaha.

It was a tight schedule of five days from construction to show especially as the venue functions all the time with restaurant, bar and regular big events.

Kit hire was not too difficult, we had a decent pair of 5ks in the venue and two hired in plus one from a TV studio…
Difficult things to obtain were clamps and brackets but after years of improvising with limited supplies we installed a safe, secure and
attractive lighting truss for three of the beamers.

Mongolia makes sense to me. Other places aside from the oft-mentioned Europe, Australia, North America, South America where there’s projection mapping? (Africa, anyone? Or, while we’re doing continents, how about Antarctic projection mapping? Bet the glaciers are fun.)

Can hacking the innards of a file give you insight into how the underlying data works – and how to unlock the aesthetic of a digital file? Here’s one way to look at that question.

Rosa Menkman, presenting at the Patterns and Pleasure Festival run by Amsterdam’s STEIM, gave a workshop today on glitch aesthetics. Based on her ongoing Vernacular of File Formats work, in particular the document above, she starts with the basics of poking and prodding bytes of data inside a file, then moves toward making images and motion out of those effects. We’ve discussed that direction in general – and “glitch” as aesthetic and technique. But I had the pleasure today of seeing Rosa work with a class full of workshop attendees on the topic.

As Rosa puts it: “Just put a little error in any file, and you see a data structure come to the surface.”

Simple File Exploration

Rosa had some nice examples in mucking about in the raw data of file formats. Simply put, though it’s worth getting the full workshop from her, this involves things like:

1. Saving an image as RAW data, then reopening the file while adjusting the interleaving, size, and offset.
2. Opening 8-bit, 16-bit, and 24-bit BMP files after cutting and pasting blocks of text or making deletions in the raw data. (Here, you can save a BMP and then open it directly in TextEdit on the Mac, for instance. I need to try other text editors – gedit, for one, recognizes that you’re trying to open a binary and stops you.)
3. Replacing index colors in an 8-bit BMP.
4. Changing index in a JPEG.
5. Working with GIF compression export and color indexing, even directly from the Export for Web (Photoshop/GIMP) dialog, and cutting and pasting and deleting as with BMP above (#2).

And then you get into PNG and you get fantastic blocky things, and PSD, and so on and so forth.

What people may not fully appreciate is the range of effects so-called “glitch” can produce – far beyond the best-known effects to a broad gamut of visual artefacts.

These are explained more fully in the above PDF. And of course for those of you messing with code, now you have more to play with — as I will certainly do next time I’m wrangling with image buffers in Java.

Rosa showed her examples in Adobe Photoshop CS, so I was interested to see if there were equivalents in the open source GIMP. To my pleasant surprise, there’s a nice, interactive dialog for opening RAW files:

You’ll find some additional options if you install the Export for Web plug-in, though here I’ve only seen an easy way to install on Windows (as binary) and Linux (via a plug-in package), not Mac.

BMP file glitch works for me, as well, and GIMP opens files even when other applications would (correctly) flag an improper end of file. Results as here:

Video Oddities

Rosa also showed some unusual video hacks, like exporting, via QuickTime Pro 7, Cinepak with 256 grays, which on playback creates some really bizarre effects thanks to inability to set a color map to those grays in most players (like VLC).

Poking around for options other than a deprecated QuickTime, I was pleased to see ffmpeg is now available on the Mac via Homebrew, which I can only describe as a faux package manager that actually is sane. (Sorry, MacPorts.) That should open up other video export/reimport hacks.

As with the text editing above, in video, Rosa works with a hex editor to manipulate video files.

Some example videos, including at top rough footage of a live set at the terrific Trouw club in Amsterdam (yes, outside the tourist district, Amsterdam has some wonderful places):

Interactive Live Glitch

Rosa is unabashedly committed to sharing what she discovers freely. One advantage of that has been that it’s inspired software.

Our friend and sometimes-contributor vade, aka Anton Marini, has produced a series of Quartz Composer plug-in effects partly inspired by this technique. The upside: you get effects you can drop into popular Mac live VJ apps, and instead of producing a handsome still or two, you can create motion effects live and in real-time in a performance. That suite of glitch plug-ins got a nice set of updates just a few months ago, so well worth mentioning again.

v002 Glitch

Another fruit of this discussion is Johann Larsby’s Monglot app, also for Mac, produced in collaboration with Rosa. Its interface is a bit baffling, but the basic notion is to create a GUI consolidated the various effects Rosa describes. Once you work those out, you can spit out tons of images. You can even take sequences of images and assemble them into video, returning to the realm of motion, as in the video here:

Monglot

Both apps are open source, but it’s clearly time to see this stuff extended to cross-platform contexts. I think having a few of us try it could be interesting – more happy accidents.

This isn’t just technical novelty. Rosa’s Glitch Festival is coming to Chicago and Amsterdam, and will assemble artists working with these media in performance as well as technical symposium.

The official site:
http://gli.tc/H/ (Abandon hope of legible websites, all ye who click here. You know, in a good, glitchy way.)

Chicago Event Kickstarter

Thanks, Rosa, for a great workshop, and STEIM for hosting.

Also, in case you missed it before, this is a must-read article by Kyle McDonald for us at CDM in regards to Anton’s work and some of the larger issues of glitch and shared community – also talking about the collaboration with Rosa:
Interview: Anton Marini on Visual Expression, Exploring Glitch, Open Community

Via the experimentation of the movement+music+visual collective in Ireland, we see another great, free tool built on Apple’s Quartz Composer developer tool. Tryplex is a set of macro patches, all open source, that makes Kinect skeleton tracking easier. There’s even a puppet tool and skeleton recorder.

Aesthetically, the video below is all stick-figure stuff (which is the only reason I can imagine why it’s getting any dislikes on YouTube). But it shouldn’t take much imagination to see the potential here.

For one example, see the video at top — something that must make Terry Gilliam get hot and bothered (or wish he had been born later).

Features:

• Synapse support, for interoperability with other Mac and Windows visual apps and depth image visibility
• OSC messages
• Loads of examples
• Puppet tool
• Skeleton recording
• 3D sculpting and modeling ideas

Have a look:
http://code.google.com/p/tryplex/

A gallery of goodness:
http://code.google.com/p/tryplex/wiki/Gallery

More info on that video at top:

http://www.giusepperagazzini.com
First experiment using my “INTERACTIVE COLLAGE MACHINE”, an interactive collage controlled by me in real time.
music: Boh blues (outro) by Diego Perugini

The Irish MIDAS collective has brought together programmers, designers, and composers working to fuse traditional and new techniques. Their premiere project is entitled “MIDASpaces,” a kind of dynamic performance space built on projection mapping and responsive interaction. As they describe it:

MIDASpaces: An interactive projection mapped space designed for the Creative Arts. Using the Latest tracking technology, the space learns, adapts and reacts, allowing the performer to create new improvised performances.

The promo video is shot in Dublin’s lovely performance space The Helix, working with a PS3 Eye camera modded for infrared light and openFrameworks for tracking. (There’s a bit of Kinect, too, they say.) Three projectors do all the work – proof that you can do quite a lot just by adding a projector or two, before you go crazy with a flock of projectors.

There are definitely some familiar tropes here, though I think that’s honestly the best place to start with a new project, and I’m eager to see where else this goes. Dancer Tom O’Donnell has been working on improvisatory dance movement, and it’s worth saying that this sort of medium can benefit from pushing choreography and music and visual content, not only the technological aspect itself.

Great work, folks; I’d love to get back to the brain trust that seems to flourish in Dublin soon!

Keep the projects coming. Lastly, a couple of videos of the work in-progress, testing both Kinect and PS3 cam:

Other ingredients: Quartz Composer, and one tool I hadn’t seen before:

tryplex, a set of macros for Kinect. Let’s put that in another post, actually.

CoGe is an upstart VJ app on the Mac, built on the foundations of Quartz Composer as a standalone VJ app. It’s been winning over some converts already – as indicated in our recent survey. But here’s the big release: version 1.0, a ground-up rewrite, which in turn debuts the app as a commercial tool.

For the best overview, see the brand-new version 1.0 quick start video at top.

Highlights new in this release:
Native support for Syphon (for interconnecting with other Mac visual apps)
Arbitrary layers
Effects
Mixer chains

Speaking of Syphon, for you projection mapping fans, here’s a good tutorial:
Connecting CoGe to MadMapper via Syphon

More info:
http://cogevj.hu/

There’s a fully-functional demo with everything but save/load. US$99 to buy, with an intro price of $79 through September 10 (+VAT). And no, it’s not free and open source any more. I’m only a little sad that it isn’t both commercial and open source, as I’d be interested to see someone try that model. But, that said, the fact that it’s built atop Quartz Composer means it’s very easy to extend with QC plug-ins, which is very cool, as is support for the open source Syphon framework. And it’s clear that the commercial part of it is necessary to support better development.

Let us know if you’re using CoGe and what you think of it – and what you’re doing with it!

MadMapper, the video projection mapping software for Mac, is now gaining some momentum. We’ll be looking at it more in the coming weeks, but to get you started, here’s an intro video showing what it does, and a tutorial from our friends at 1024 Architecture dealing with a popular project – turning a building into a giant reactive musical equalizer.

The folks behind it, Francois Wunschel and Pierre Schneider, have been doing some fantastic artistic work, so this isn’t just about gimmicks. (see link below)

The essential ingredients in the tutorial:
A Mac
MadMapper (there’s a free demo version, before you shell out EUR299 for a 2-machine license)
Quartz Composer (free Apple tool)
Syphon, the free Mac inter-app framework

Read the full how-to:
MadMapper tutorial | Turn a building into a giant Equalizer

Other useful tutorials:
Multiple video inputs
Grid warping
Spacial Scanner (for automatic mapping!)
Kinect integration

Working with:
Resolume
VDMX
Max/MSP and Jitter
Quartz Composer

And for loads more tutorials and inspiration, see the 1024 architecture blog:
http://1024d.wordpress.com/

More background, from previous coverage:

MadMapper, New Mapping Tool, Released with DMX-Made Cocktails; Video Examples [Create Digital Motion]

With Neon Guitars and Immersive Projection, 1024 Architecture Become Audiovisual Rock Band [Create Digital Music]

Live visuals and VJing are growing and maturing faster than ever, but even as projectors beam stunning visuals into performances and installations, there’s surprisingly little light shed on the community behind the work. Earlier this summer, CDM asked readers what visual apps you used. Some 1,152 of you responded from around the world – a dramatic sample of this vivid network of visual practitioners. And at last, we get to share the results. It’s not a contest – we’re as interested in what people are doing on the fringes as what’s popular – but the results are fascinating.

Tools

Amidst some serious variety, some clear favorites emerged. (To be fair, the leading visual apps did mobilize their readership to go and vote, but that in itself to me is meaningful. And these results were consistent with what we’ve seen from readers and the scene.)

Modul8, Resolume Avenue, Quartz Composer, and VDMX clearly led the pack. In fact, if you combine Resolume Avenue 3 users (25% of respondents) with Resolume 2.x die-hards (8%), it’s the most popular tool on the site. The results, ranked:

1. Modul8 (28.5%)
2. Resolume Avenue 3 (25.6%)
3. Vidvox VDMX (19.4%)
4. Apple Quartz Composer (19.3%)
5. Max/MSP/Jitter (16%) *
6. Processing (15.4%)
7. vvvv (10.2%)
8. ArKaos GrandVJ (8.4%)
9. Resolume 2.x (8.1%)
10. Isadora (6.9%)
11. OpenFrameworks (5.8%)
12. Pd/GEM (4.3%)

The biggest surprise: there’s some seriously geeky stuff on there. I’m surprised Quartz Composer cracks the top three, even if it is free, and Processing and OpenFrameworks also make strong showings for coders. So do Jitter and vvvv for patchers.

A handful of you also use other, lesser-known tools we included — Touch Designer nearly climbed above Pd, and we saw significant numbers running mobile apps and game engines.

There’s a strong plurality for everything else, too – 16% of you said you used tools we didn’t list.

The big loser: hardware. Only 16 readers out of all the respondents said they use hardware exclusively. Viva la computer.

Interesting entrants for that “other” category, meanwhile: lots of CoGe users, NuVJ, Cinder, AVmixer pro, Fluxus, and some unusual choices, like GamePad Companion for Guitar Hero,VLC, Winamp AVS, and, yes, someone says they use PowerPoint.

CoGe is technically built in Quartz Composer, so score that as another win for Apple’s platform.

* Jitter was briefly excluded from the survey answers because of an error; those results were tabulated and clearly put Jitter ahead of Processing but behind VDMX. Definitely a strong showing for Cycling ’74.

Operating systems

No surprise here. The Mac was the big winner – which goes hand-in-hand with seeing that a lot of your favorite tools (Quartz Composer, VDMX, Modul8) only run on Mac OS. Given ongoing readership by Linux advocates, I thought the Linux showing was downright abysmal. Given the lack of interest in Linux relative even to the music world, I think the free OS has a long way to go in the visual department. Again, it’s not a popularity contest – if someone wants to work on that, we’d love to hear about it.

1. Mac OS X (71.8%)
2. Windows (25.7%)
3. Linux (1.9%)

Don’t despair, Windows users – that still means 1 in 4 of you runs Windows, so we’re not ignoring you. And even if 1 in 50 runs Linux, we also know that coverage of Linux for visuals is often lacking. So expect tri-OS coverage (and beyond), as always.

Geography

SurveyGizmo automatically collects geographic data. The top countries:

1. United States (23.8%)
2. Germany (9.7%)
3. United Kingdom (9.6%)
4. Canada (5.5%)
5. Netherlands (5.0%)
6. France (3.9%)

And other popular countries: Italy, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, Denmark, Austria, Hungary, Ireland, Mexico, Portugal, Switzerland, and the Russian Federation.

Top cities included, by a pretty wide margin:
Berlin
New York City
Buenos Aires
Chicago
Dublin
London
Montreal
Paris
San Francisco
Sao Paolo
Toronto

Berlin, London, and NYC led by far, but down the curve, you all come from basically everywhere. And that, to me, is the most interesting information of all.

More comments? Let us know.

The Glitch Mob is one of the hot summer tickets for electronic music, and they’re fortunate enough to stage a massive live visual spectacle alongside the show. This week’s a perfect time to consider all that visual goodness, with the release of their latest original music, “We Can Make the World Stop” on EP.

So how does that scale of real-time performance come together? We find out, from the guy running the show live. He walks us through everything, from the technical setup to the performance elements to the team that brings it to life, in the kind of detail you normally only get touring the stage. -Ed.

This is Momo the Monster checking in from the road, on tour with The Glitch Mob for the summer of 2011. I’m here to spill the beans on who’s involved in making the show, and how it all works.

The Team

The man with the vision is Martin Phillips of Bionic League, who, along with John McGuire, designed the Daft Punk ‘Alive’ Tour, Deadmau5′s Cube, and tours for Wolfgang Gartner, Kanye West, Nine Inch Nails, Weezer, and many more. He worked with the band to design a set that would take their stage presence to the next level, creating three separate pods for the band members, using their existing BrightStripe lights in a new configuration, and adding an LED wall behind them to bind all the elements into one cohesive stage.

With the stage design in place, Martin worked with Mike Figge and his crew at Possible in the creation of visuals for each song in The Glitch Mob’s current repertoire. Both the LED Wall and the BrightStripes on stage are controlled by the videos that Possible created – more on that in a bit.

The last piece in the puzzle is yours truly, Momo the Monster, the final cog in the great visual machine of the tour. With the stage designed and most of the visuals created, my roles are:

1. Pre-Tour: Build a playback system to control the wall (BasicTech F-11 Tiles) and tubes (Mega-Lite BrightStripes).
2. Rehearsal: Help the team make the whole system work together and practice the songs with the band.
3. Before First Show: Design visuals for songs that don’t have Possible tracks already.
4. Tour: Oversee setup/teardown of the system for each show, troubleshoot issues, run the video for the show, working with the house Lighting Director at each venue to make best use of the in-house lighting system to supplement our stage.

The Hardware

The wall is made up of seven columns, each of which have three BasicTech F-11 LED Tiles. These tiles take a signal from a proprietary BasicTech processor, and display a section of the overall video on their LED Array. Each tile has an address you set on the back which describes its place on the grid, ie (0,0) for the topmost-left tile, (0,1) for the tile just to the right of it, etc. The processor takes a 1600×1200 image and splits it up amongst all the tiles. Each tile has one video input connector and two outputs,  so a coaxial cable carries the signal into the first tile, which sends the signal up it’s column as well as over to the next column. Coaxial works well as you can run it long distances – in this case we have a 300-foot loom of two cables so we can accomodate the largest venues we play (like Red Rocks, Colorado).

The tiles all have custom plates on the back created by Flix FX, which have clamps on the back that are affixed to poles at each show, and inserted into heavy metal bases. Having each tile column on a separate pole instead of connected as one flat, contiguous wall allows us to shrink or expand the wall as necessary to fit on various size stages.

The stations are made up of risers with custom fittings and tables, created by Accurate Staging. The lights are Mega-Lite BrightStripes, which The Glitch Mob used in a different configuration on their previous tour. Each stripe is affixed to aluminum piping, which comes apart in two sections, leaving most of the cabling intact. Each stripe is controlled by DMX commands, and can be thought of as a 1×16-pixel screen.

At Front-Of-House, I’m using a MacBook Pro with an APC40, Akai LPK25, and MidiFighter as my controllers. The LED Processors live with my rig, and we run Coaxial and Cat6 cables all the way to the stage. The Cat6 carries ArtNet signals to a PRG Virtuoso Node, which converts the ArtNet signals to 6 DMX Universes to run the stripes on each station.

The Software

The main playback engine is VDMX, whose new beta8 includes Syphon integration, which is a major key to this show. It handles playback of the synced videos, and sends out a copy of the main video mixdown via Syphon.

Arkaos MediaMaster Express sees the VDMX Mixdown via a handy little trick. While it doesn’t support Syphon directly, I created a simple Quartz Composer patch which takes the Syphon image and displays it on a full-screen Billboard. MediaMaster supports Quartz Composer, so in this way it easily runs a Syphon input. MediaMaster does what is called PixelMapping (not to be confused with Projection Mapping), which translates the video image into DMX commands, which are used to drive the BrightStripes on stage. Originally, I’d rolled my own pixel mapping program, using Cinder to read the Syphon input and translate pixels to DMX values. It worked great in my studio, when I’d planned on four DMX universes due to some faulty logic. Unfortunately, it turned out that we needed at least five, and the ArtNet Server that my program depended on (OLA, which is mostly fantastic), relies on LibArtNet, which currently only supports four universes. Major props to Arkaos for a last-minute save with MediaMaster when I was beginning to tear my hair out over getting the lights up and running.

The final piece of the puzzle is a custom OpenFrameworks application with a working name of GlitchLights. Here is what a final video from Possible looks like:

Using this template as a starter, I created an application to draw boxes on each tile – I can draw them individually, or trigger a random number of them (mirrored on the Y Axis for prettiness). Once I had a little more time, I upgraded the program to draw a mini version of the wall inside each box, resulting in a space-invader-like creature instead of a solid box. The MidiFighter turned out to be a pretty perfect controller for this show – I’ve got a 7×3 grid to work with, so I use a 4×3 array of buttons from the MF to control the squares (always mirroring on Y), and I’ve still got a row free along the top for modifier buttons. I put the mini keyboard to use controlling the BrightStripes – each key lights up half a station, with another set of three keys which will light up a full station. This makes it easy to jam along with the band while still looking deliberate (I found that controlling columns of lights or even individual lights looked too messy with the limited amount of practice time I had).

A final bit that bears mentioning – I use the APC-40-22 MIDI Remote script with some custom changes to light up the buttons on my APC40, which I use for triggering videos, changing layer opacity, adding FX and jumping to cue points in the videos.

The Performance

For the many songs which have videos that are perfectly synced with them, my job is very simple. Each video has the audio of its song embedded, so I trigger the video on the first hit of the song, and slip the timeline forward/back to as necessary to match the audio in my headphones with the audio in the venue. Once it’s locked in, I mostly nod my head, pump my fist, and watch to make sure nothing goes wrong, checking in with my headphones every minute or so to make sure we’re still good. If needed, I’ve set 8 cue points at key parts of the song that I can jump to via buttons on my APC40. For the few songs which have not been designed by the good folks at Possible, I have one or two background clips that I’ve created (mostly by modifying the amazing Beeple’s videos) and I trigger visuals via my GlitchLights app in time with the band. I’ve also found Memo’s BadTV Quartz Composer plugin to fit quite well with the show, with the parameter mapped to four knobs on my APC40.

The Future

I continue to work on GlitchLights as time allows, adding new animations and objects to my live playback repertoire. I’d like to get a Midi-to-Cat5 extender so I can receive live data from the band as they play and have them control the wall directly. I’ve also been inspired by their Lemur playback style, and I’m working on an iPad app that’s both a controller and a game, influenced by The Glitch Mob. The band is amazingly receptive to new ideas, I’m sure the show will continue to grow and change as we travel.

Thanks for reading, and come see the show! It’s a great spectacle, and an amazing thing to be a part of. I’m happy to chat before or after the shows, and you’re welcome to look over my shoulder during – just don’t try to talk to me while we’re running, and for the love of FSM – don’t put your beer on my table.

It’s been caught in the shadow of (perhaps well-deserved) controversy over Final Cut Pro X, but Apple’s Motion is worth a look, whether or not you’re even a Final Cut user. (Final Cut Pro X is not required in order to buy Motion.)

At $50, Motion gives you a range of dynamic animation behaviors, real-time image processing filters, three-dimensional transforms and lighting, and ace chroma key features. In fact, for readers of this site working on live visual gigs, it’s even more ideal, perfect for dropping in assets and quickly whipping up eye candy – all the more so with a laptop-friendly UI and fast output even without a dedicated workstation. It could be that extra tool that allows you to put together quick motion assets for a live performance set. I like its MIDI features for hands-on control of visual compositions, though I’m not quite ready to go as far as using it as a live tool itself, even though I once saw a demo suggesting that. It’s just a nice, real-time visual engine.

You can read my more detailed thoughts in the review of mine published on Macworld:

Pros
Parameter rigs a boon to control and Final Cut collaboration alike
Fantastic, easy chroma key
Real-time visual tweaking fun and fast as ever
New, faster, more modern architecture
Incredibly low price

Cons
Final Cut Pro X integration is limited to exporting templates
No native EPS import
No stereoscopic 3D support

I’m indebted to the thoroughness and detail both of my colleagues at Macworld and to the team at Apple; here’s the full review:

Apple Motion 5 [Macworld.com]

But here’s the important detail: you don’t need Final Cut Pro X to take advantage of Motion 5′s power. What you lose is, admittedly, a cool feature – the ability to export dynamic templates to a Final Cut editor, or gain real-time parameter control from the Final Cut side. That functionality will only work with the new Final Cut Pro X, not previous versions. But on the other hand, parameter rigs can be just as useful within Motion, and export to video is fast and easy. (For another $50, you can add on Compressor for yet more control – again, without necessarily investing in Final Cut Pro X.)

In other words, if you use Premiere, Vegas, Avid, Final Cut Pro 7, or anything else, you’re still staring a live, real-time, 3D, hardware-accelerated visual powerhouse in the face that costs only US$50. At that price, I can imagine even a lot of After Effects die-hards picking up the software.

Now, don’t get me started on Final Cut’s magnetic timeline — not yet, anyway — but if you want to feel warm, fuzzy thoughts about having a Mac for visuals again, Motion could be your ticket.

One final side note that didn’t make it into my Motion review, because for Macworld readers, it’s not nearly as relevant as it is for Create Digital Motion readers. Quartz Composer compositions are not directly supported in Motion, as with previous versions. Quartz Composer remains a terrific tool; it simply lacks the color calibration features and aspect ratio handling that Motion has. QC can be used with Motion, if you’re a developer – it’s supported as part of the FxPlug 2 SDK. But you don’t get the kind of drag-and-drop QC composition use you do with VJ apps like VDMX. That’s no worry: you can just make some visual work in Motion and export to video alongside QC work, then bring the two together in your visual set in a dedicated live visual app.