If you’re not interested in the Vixid mixer or 3L, then I apologize for my posts over the last couple of weeks, but after a year of touring and creating on someone else’s schedule, I’m very excited to be able to set my own agenda and focus on the things I’m interested in.

Disclaimers aside, I’ve been working with my cheapie security cameras, feeding them power and conducting their video to somewhere it can be useful. Once wired, the challenge was to get the correct doses of midi to the Vixid, and thus motivate it to output The Crazy.

But now The Crazy is out of the box, so I’ll show you what it looks like, then explain how it came to be.

In putting together this effect I tried both Ableton Live and VDMX to no avail. Both programs were able to send the correct values over the right midi channels, but the VJX control I’m trying to achieve requires sending of distinct CC messages for very precise, quick switching. If I’m aiming for “proper” one-camera-per-frame bullet time, that’s one input every 40 milliseconds. To use 8 cameras I also have to switch inputs for each layer. This switching causes a 2-3 frame freeze on the input - as it puts the video stream in sync - so layer inputs need to be switched when that layer isn’t “active” and currently visible.

These constraints led me to Max/MSP, mostly because I had a review copy already installed on my machine. I’d read through some of the tutorials, but never actually attempted to program anything with Max. So this afternoon was spent traipsing through documentation, patching, and testing. After several near-misses and a realization that I wouldn’t be able to achieve an elegant solution without wasting time studying, I went back and created a brute-force solution using the modules I understood.

(Possibly NSFW due to excessively hacky code)

This is something I’ve been working on for quite a while, but I’ve realised that there are too many new things on the horizon which will take up my time (and my computers’ CPU cycles) so I’ve decided to release it as a draft rather than sitting on it until "perfect".

While there’s still some editing and motion tweaking to be done, this piece is rather time consuming to preview and render. As the action speeds up it is blending many high resolution images together for each frame.

The video compresses around 10 hours of stencil cutting into 4 minutes. Shot with the same Pentax *ist DS as my previous time lapse efforts, the camera takes around 35 frames per minute at 1536×1024. This gives plenty of leeway for pan and scan in post production if outputting to SD or lower resolutions.

This method of shooting allows a very high quality look, with minimal expenditure. I had some problems with this camera’s viewfinder focus and auto-aperture function recently, the repair quote was AU$300, while a new K100D (the new version of the *ist) is under AU$600 including a lens. With prices for digital SLRs getting this low, a proper SLR version of the ghetto timeslice rig can’t be too far away.