Our friend Richard Lainhart sends this lovely "swirly thing" (to use technical terms). His description:
An abstract HD film animated in After Effects. The soundtrack, "The Beautiful Blue Sky", is a realtime electronic synthesizer improvisation for Buchla 200e and Haken Continuum.
My description:
Mmmm…
Oh, sorry. Forgot what I was saying: staring into swirly thing. Hey, it’s the weekend. Enjoy!
When Adobe acquired Macromedia, a lot of people thought that’d be the end of Director. After all, Director and Flash have had increasingly overlapping capabilities for some time, and Director seemed like something people used years ago. Think again: talk to people doing interactive design, and Director — for better or worse — lives on.
With the Director 11 update announced this week, that’s unlikely to change any time soon. New in this release:
Vista support on Windows, Intel support on Mac
Bitmap filters (a la the bitmap API in Flash 8/9, I’m assuming)
Full JavaScript support and Code Snippets
Enhanced Flash support with CS3 and Flash Video support
Now, it’s a more longer beach. Hmmm… too bad you can’t do this to the real world.
“Content-aware” image resizing — the ability to stretch images without distortion — is all the rage. vade covered the technology at last summer’s SIGGRAPH, and we’ve since seen publicly-available tools. But the New York Times musters an entire feature story on the topic (now it’s definitely mainstream), complete with a monster round-up of tools.
Adobe has just recently stated that Quicktime 7.4 and After Effects are not getting along well. Survey says, pass this one up until bugs have been ironed out - which, presumably is what testing is for, but I digress. Read more on blogs.adobe.com.
Musicians have thousands of years of history when it comes to interfaces and instruments, but visuals are relatively new. Little wonder, then, that visualists are eager to try new interfaces to help make visuals akin to performance instruments. Or, in less lofty terms, let’s get Wii remote wagging in the club tonight.
Over on createdigitalmusic.com, we’re celebrating Game Day — basically, I’m squeezing as many game-related posts into 24 hours, because a whole bunch of tips came in at once. A couple of Wii-related controller solutions jumped out.
Wii + Flash
MoteDaemon = Flash (and Flex, and AIR) + Wii, on Mac. On Windows, look to WiiFlash.org. (I imagine it wouldn’t be hard to modify your code to use one or the other on each respective platform if you want to develop cross-platformly.
Getting hardware control in Adobe Flash requires some work: basically, you need a client-server model. The good news is, there are already two Wii-specific solutions out there.
Pretty soon, people are cooking up Minority Report demos with Flash (using Papervision for 2.5D-style 3D in Flash’s 2D world, and Open Dynamics Engine for physics):
I’d loved to see this coupled with something like Onyx for an all-Wii, all-Flash performance app. With Flex and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), this could be the basis for some really hard-core, full-blown apps … though you will be limited by Flash’s slower performance, at least in comparison to C/C++-based tools like Max or even Java.
Looks like Linux users are presently out of luck, unless I’m missing something (feel free to chime in if you know a cross-platform alternative).
Wii + MIDI, OpenSoundControl (OSC)
For a more app-agnostic solution, you can hook up a Wii to send MIDI or, ideally, OpenSoundControl (OSC) to apps that support it (vvvv, Max, Pd, and hopefully VJ apps soon — I’ve heard a couple of developers working on it).
On Mac, you can send both OSC and MIDI with one app, perfectly-suited to taking data from the Wii controller: OSCulator. OSCulator is a great tool for the Wii, but it also shows promise of what a hardware input hub could generally look like, with open-ended inputs controlling visuals and sound rather than pre-defined, MIDI-style keyboards and knob and faderboxes as have traditionally been used in music.
On PC, GlovePIE is an awesomely-powerful scripting tool for use with Wii and other game devices. I’ve talked about it endlessly before, but I’ll stay quiet — just go. Get it. Enjoy. In fact, with OSCulator on Mac and GlovePIE on Windows, it’s hard not to be insanely happy on either platform.
Another interesting out-of-the-box alternative, though, is the new Wiinstrument. It’s largely geared for playing back drum samples, but it’s not hard to take that metaphor and use those control changes and other MIDI messages as visual controls — especially if you think of your “drum kit” as sets of visual clips (video or other visuals).
Boy, there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think how much more productive I could be if every single one of my creative apps ran online.
Wait.
Scratch that. No, I’ve actually never thought that.
Online applications can be fantastic. I’m using one right now. Having Flickr for photos and Vimeo for videos, and so on, can vastly expand the potential of what you can do with media. And I certainly see casual users of those applications preferring online services in some cases. (On the other hand, I also know even a lot of casual photographers who would rather sit in Aperture or Lightroom and tweak their photos than struggle with a Web app — for them, the Web is about uploading and sharing, not editing.)
It’s just really hard to see why pros would need to do everything online. And here’s the fundamental problem: why are we talking about taking applications online rather than taking online to applications? Witness Adobe’s Bruce Chizen making vague predictions about the far-off future — ten years, to be exact. By that point, we might as well start talking about how we’ll all be flooded by global warming and under attack by the Mutant Bug People who have dominated the Earth. But in ten years, says Adobe, their products will be fully online. Why? Uh … haven’t figure that one out yet, evidently.
Intelligent Resizing: Seam Carving Publicly Available -
Vade posted about the extremely sexy content-aware image resize “Seam Carving” a little over a month ago, and implementations for Gimp, Photoshop and a web2.0ish version - rsizr - are now available.
The rsizr.com server’s being hammered a bit at the moment, so the “Save†function takes rather a long time to work. It’s easy enough to get around that, though - once you get your image the way you want, just take a screenshot of the window and cut the image out of it.
(I presume there’ll be a decent free Photoshop-plugin image carver Real Soon Now. In other news, one of the guys who came up with the idea has been hired by Adobe.)
The advantages of this combination are potent for visual development:
File system API (so you can easily manage video clips, generative sketches, whatever)
Native window system API (so your UI looks at home on your OS)
Flex, for CSS + XML goodness
Clarity of the ActionScript 3.0 language (I’m totally onboard with this one, frankly, despite complaints from AS old-timers)
Ease of development in Eclipse
As I noted, it looks like MIDI support comes from an external application. But there’s hope for more interesting possibilities in the future, by hooking up VISP to Java via a new AIR-to-Java bridge called Artemis:
Now we’re talking. It seems Michael is thinking like I was: wouldn’t it be great to have Processing hooked up to all of this? Now, of course, I hoped to do everything on the Java side, though there is that pesky problem with video support in Java being, how shall we say, less than fresh. But, in the meantime, I’m happy to combine the two where it makes sense.
Onyx was a little shorter on the AIR stuff (aka Apollo), which is what lets you manage files from the file system, so I could see some of what’s in VISP benefiting Onyx, as well .. and visa versa.
Now, someone in Javaland: you know you really want to improve Java’s multimedia support. Come on. All the Adobe people are having so much fun. They’re going to have much better parties. Think about it, won’t you? (Yes, unfortunately, Apple is one of the players who could help remedy the situation and they’re extraordinarily unlikely to be interested, but surely there’s a way.)
We’ve mentioned VISP earlier in the year, an open source VJ app based on Adobe’s Flex and AIR (formerly Apollo) Rich Internet Application platform. Despite some delays, VISP has been released. Check out VISP-VJ.com for downloads and source code. VISP’s home page contains tutorials, introduction videos and guidelines to download the latest frameworks required by the app. Geared towards generative real-time visuals, VISP looks be be a pretty exciting release, especially considering its open nature.
Some features straight from VISPs homepage:
Works on both Windows and Mac platforms.
Outputs a max resolution of 640×480 to a second screen.
Supports MIDI input via a separate Java application (watch the screencast). Ed.: This is necessary because MIDI input remains impossible with Flash/Flex/AIR; you can get data in via XML sockets, but that requires Java — or something ese — to do the actual MIDI. -PK
Emphasis on performing the content rather than managing a complex user interface.
Use transitions to more seamlessly move from one piece of content to another.
Use up to two filters simultaneously to add post-render effects to your output.
Create your own custom content, transitions, and filters with ActionScript 3.
Geared toward generative content, not video clip triggering.
Intentionally feature-deprived to impose constraints, allowing you to focus on your content and creativity.
We’ll be sure to give VISP a good one over and report back as soon as we can!
Ed.: Cool, but I’m still also interested in Onyx VJ. It’s also Flash/Flex-based, so much of what’s here is still true (though I think these are perfectly usable for video triggering). But Onyx has a lot of additional filters and features, including one very nice one: video playback from a VLC server. Of course, nothing stops you from trying both, since they’re both free.
Now, as for generative visuals, seems it’s time for the Processing community to respond. There’s nothing stopping you from doing something similar with Processing and Java, and since they can take advantage of OpenGL/Java3D 3D visuals, among other features, you’ve got more flexibility than with Flash. The main thing is, building a Java app to host other Processing sketches introduces a fair bit of complexity, so developing something would take some work. I’m doing some more limited experiments for my own performance with Processing; if any of it is useful, I’ll be sure to share. -PK
HDV Device Problems? The Culprit Might Just Be Windows -
Since picking up my HVR-V1P I haven’t actually spent much time editing or otherwise working with HD video, instead spending my time out on the road shooting and performing. After returning (and taking a holiday) the rest of the band have settled down to recording an album and I, as part of my preproduction schedule, embarked on a Windows/CS3 reinstall to have a clean slate upon which to create music videos to accompany said album.
Which is where my problems started. Like Peter I chose to go with a sleek, bloat-free Windows XP installation. After the install completed I installed various software and drivers and all was fine, until I plugged my camera in on HDV mode.
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2008-Jan-22@00:36
