Bart from Resolume has posted some details of the release of FreeFrame 1.5, including OpenGL-based FreeFrameGL:

FreeFrame 1.5 Release

Here’s why it makes us smiling, happy visualists:

• Open and wide: It’s open, and supported by multiple hosts (the creators of VJamm, Resolume, and Salvation all contributed to the 1.5 team)
• GPU, go! It gives you GPU-powered goodness, meaning more flexibility, power, and speed for 2D and 3D effects alike
• More pixels, more frames: It runs at higher resolutions and frame rates
• Third Dimension: It supports 3D functions and pixel shaders for joyous new eye candy
• Timing: A timing function allows time-dependent visual effects like particle systems and physical simulations (tasty!)
• Developer-friendly: Sample projects (Microsoft Visual Studio, Delphi, Xcode) and source should help get coders up and running — and the coders then turn out goodness for you non-coders
• User-friendly: If you don’t want to code, you can expect lots more awesome plug-ins for your VJ app of choice.

Join us in CDM Labs: If you’re interested in joining a special CDMotion team working on additional documentation and sample projects, give me a holler. Otherwise, stay tuned.

Pictured: one of the Resolume team’s plug-ins in development.

Anyone up for doing the Death Star?

It’s still early in development (read: it often crashes), but The Bean Machine applies nodal, patch-based development to Java. The interface is mysteriously close to Quartz Composer, down to capabilities, UI, and even the 3D cube tutorial. Personally, I use Java because it can do things Quartz Composer can’t, but it’s interesting nonetheless — and raises, again, the question of why we don’t see more tools that try to meld the capabilities of code and patches.

The cool bit: nodes are Java Beans, so you really could use this to combine the best of both worlds if it matures. No download yet, but we’ll be watching … perhaps it will inspire other developers, as well.

The project is labeled “experimental”, but could be worth a look. Developer Jerry Huxtable has lots of other goodies for Java-heads on his page, including lots of 2D image processing stuff and a map editor — Processing lovers, might want to pop this into your del.icio.us.

Bean Machine @ JH Labs

JH Labs main page with lots o’ projects

2008 is looking like an extraordinary year for visualists: there’s an explosion of new software tools for live visuals. One of the most eagerly-anticipated is 3L (pronounced “Thrill”), a multi-purpose live visual application for Mac, from the massively-talented artificialeyes trio of Pascal Lesport, Michael Parenti and Todd Thille. (Todd, FYI, you may have to change that last name to 3iL.) We’ll be showing and explaining where 3L fits in, but let me jump into my unedited geeky take on it first.

3L is unique in that it takes a lot of the cool generative effects people are doing in individual patches for Max or Processing, loads them into one massively modular interface, and mixes in the prerequisite amount of pixel processing, audio, and MIDI. It’s like the monster Jitter patch you’ll never have time to finish, all on one screen — one very big screen; the software actually requires 1440×900 resolution to operate. If they had just done that, Thrill might fade into the blur of other modular environments created in recent years, but the software has also been packed with features tested by the Artificial Eyes crew in their gigs — meaning a whole lot of what you’d want to be able to do in a club is there already, including countless features you may not have even thought of yet. Pascal also apparently coded his way around limitations in Jitter.

We got an inside peek at the software in Perth. In fact, we peeked at a little too much — so much, we’re still, erm, editing all the footage we shot. And we might have gotten into that editing in Perth were we not out until the wee hours of the morning VJing with Thrill. Jack and Coke, Western Australian nightclub filled with ridiculously young-looking clubgoers, plus a completely unfamiliar interface that looks like the love child of Max/MSP, a 747, and a spaceship? Hell, yeah. With everything wired for MIDI and sound reactivity, Jaymis and I immediately found ourselves zoning into pulsing abstract patterns, even when we weren’t entirely sure what we were doing.

VDMX, the “realtime video studio” from the makers of Grid, semi-modular live visualist tool for Mac, and very possibly the “world’s most mature beta software”, continues to pack goodness into each new beta release. But the most recent addition, just now available as part of the primary public beta release, warms my heart. The latest beta adds support for OpenSoundControl or OSC, a protocol for communicating between computers, hardware, and software. With high-resolution data, an open-ended naming scheme, and network savvy, OSC is just plain better than MIDI at at least some tasks. But it’s suffered from a lack of documentation, a vague specification that’s a bit too open-ended and daunting to developers, and most of all, a lack of critical mass as far as tools. One small step at a time, that’s changing.

So far, the VDMX developers have tested their implementation with the multi-touch Lemur controller and inter-app data with Apple’s free Quartz Composer. But OSC is also supported in Processing, Max/MSP/Jitter, Pure Data, and free controller implementations for the Wii remote and Wacom tablet, among many other things. It’s also supported natively by the Monome controller, which is quite a lot cheaper than a Lemur. Want to pipe data from a Wacom into Quartz Composer? Sync data between a Mac running VDMX and a PC running vvvv? Something … uh … else that I haven’t thought of? Quite a lot is possible.

And an iPhone implementation could come next. (Or you can send OSC from iPhone right now, with MrMr.)

You can try this out in the beta that’s available now, though David Lublin from Vidvox warns us:

…there’s still more to do with OSC, currently no way to trigger files, it’s just control data, but the core functionality for sending and receiving is there, so we really just need to start building on top of that for whatever protocols there are to support

…the OSC support is still very much in it’s early stages.. it is there and stable, but we are barely scratching the surface of what we can do with it

Of course, that description could apply to OSC in general, which is why the two CDM’s (createdigitalmusic and createdigitalmotion) will be working over the course of 2008 to work with users and developers to share knowledge and get better implementations in everyone’s hands sooner. It’s something I hope to check in on while I’m at NAMM next week. Stay tuned.

Vidvox + VDMX5

VDMX5 public beta direct download link (Mac only)

Introduction to OpenSoundControl [opensoundcontrol.org]

Speaking of multi-touch OSC implementations, we hope to catch up with CyberPatrolUnit, who’s working on a VJ interface on Lemur, as pictured below. He’ll be bringing it to the CDM NAMM party, so if you’re in LA, come see us next Friday!

Here in Los Angeles the weather is currently sunny and warm - great for going to the park, but not so much for creating that Xmas/New Year’s Wintry feeling. Here’s a patch you can use to fill the room with snowy interactive goodness. Fire up your Projector, Big Screen TV, or Wrist-worn LCD Display and let it snow!

Here’s a clip of the patch in action:

Interactive Snowflake Maker from momo_the_monster on Vimeo.

You can download the Quartz Composer patch here:
Momo the Monster: Interactive Snowflake Generator (Direct Download)

Open it up in Quartz Composer, and drag your mouse pointer over the output window to make beautiful silvery patterns. If you want to go full-screen with it, I recommend you set the monitor to 640×480 to keep a good framerate.

I’ve got a version controlled by a joystick that I put together for my Company’s holiday party - let me know if you make anything new out of it! Enjoy, and Happy Everything.

Quartz Composer, first introduced in OS X 10.4 and rooted in the underground visual app PixelShox, is a hidden gem in Mac OS X. This free visual tool makes some sophisticated video and 3D magic possible without coding. While promising, the version in 10.4 had some significant shortcomings. We turn to Keith Lang of developer plasq, creators of Skitch and ComicLife, to give us an inside look. Keith is not a programmer — so he’s all the more eager to go the visual patching route — but he has had his hands on QC for some time in Leopard dev builds. And now, he’s free to tell us all he knows. -PK

Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” is here, and the initial hoopla about the reflective dock has died down. Now that we’ve all passed through the Seven Stages of Acceptance, we have an opportunity to take this brief slither of quiet to delve into the subtler changes within the big new cat. Those changes include improvements made to Quartz Composer, the quaint and oft-misunderstood visual processing environment bundled with the Developer Tools.

What You See: The Interface

For the uninitiated, Quartz Composer is an ‘environment’ tool which lets you patch together various elements in order to build screensavers, performance environments, and animated windows for use within an application. If you’ve ever looked at an Apple screensaver, played with the new iChat Effects or watched photos float and twirl on an Apple TV, then you’re familiar with what Quartz Composer can do. Its peers are tools like Pd (Pure Data), Processing, and Max/MSP/Jitter, with Quartz Composer heavily geared towards motion animation of processed video and images. Input can be everything ranging from your iSight to XML to audio to a Wiimote, with output being a window on 3d space containing all the sprites, effects and movement you care for. Because Quartz Composer is a real-time system, you can plug stuff together whilst watching and tweaking. The underlying engine is very efficient - and with a little work you can create teh cool, without ever needing to type teh code.

Pd, aka Pure Data, is the free and open-source cousin of Max/MSP/Jitter. It’s powerful — even sometimes having technical advantages over Max — but has suffered from complex installation and dependencies, poor documentation, and an unpolished interface. Enter Pd-extended, a distribution that fills in those gaps. Pd-extended’s maintainer Hans-Christoph writes up what this is all about in an introduction on Create Digital Music, friendly even if you’re new to the Pd world.

Pd, Max’s Free Cousin, Gets Polish and Ease in Extended Build

Visualists should be especially interested in this latest release, because it offers much-improved out-of-the-box support for custom-patched 3D and video — especially if you’re on a Mac, for the PiDiP (though there are Windows and Linux improvements, too, and GEM works even with Windows).

Mac OS improvements:

• Image and video-processing PDP/PiDiP work out-of-box
• Anti-aliasing of boxes and lines in the interface
• New, purty icon

Linux:

• A .deb package for Debian and Ubuntu, with GNOME menu support. (`Bout time! Wonder if this means we’ll see it in the big Ubuntu repositories?)
• New icon

All platforms:

• GEM, the quasi-Jitter-like 3D and pixel library, has working shader support. Ed.: Truly outrageous.
• New libraries: mapping, msd, mrpeach net/OSC, flib
• [comport] is robust on all platforms (can you say Arduino?)
• Font-face and -font-weight command line options
• New font and layout is the exact same size on all platforms to the pixel. (previously you’d see some serious cross-platform glitching)

Pd Extended Release

And lest you have a bad taste in your mouth from the fugly older releases of Pd, Anton (vade) sends along the picture at the top of this story, showing the new UI from the Pd 0.40 dailies running on Mac OS X. Anton is also working on porting some of his brilliant visual patching from Max to Pd — and he’s living proof that even a Max die-hard can find at least some use with Pd, too. (The two environments are really, really close — sometimes confusion switching between them is because they’re so close, the differences can be confusing.)

iPhone development continues despite a lack of SDK. Masayuki Akamatsu has updated his native iPhone OSC client aka.iphone to 2.1, and includes plethora of screen/input configurations to suit your mobile performance needs. The update should suit typical VJ and Dj applications with its range of GUI sliders, knobs, button grids, etc.

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, be sure and check out aka.iphone. Very cool stuff. Yes, sorry, another Apple oriented update. Shoot me.

[Ed.: Note you will want Max/MSP/Jitter to work with this app, though I think it should work with Windows, too; I just lack a machine that can test it. Be sure to see also Masayuki's complete Max collection, which now covers everything from Wii remotes to 3D SpaceNavigator controllers, Apple Remotes, and even the motion sensor in the MacBook Pro. Completely brilliant. And needless to say, even if you don't want to hop on AT&T's mobile network, this gives you options with iPod Touch, too, even if you can't play Phase on that. -PK]

Create Digital Music got an interesting comment about allegedly, what really happened to Java in Leopard. Short version: nearly all of the development team is gone; the one Java 6 person left and many others were moved to, of all things, iCal. Java 5 is likely to be all you get on Leopard, and still without improvements to JavaSound or QuickTime for Java, which have left sound and video support pretty weak. (QuickTime for Java is an even worse choice on Windows, though at least on Windows and Linux JavaSound runs better.)

Caution: this could be no more than a rumor. There seems to still be a Java development team at Apple, so at the very least, it sounds exaggerated. However, it’s also clear that Apple’s commitment to developing Java on the Mac is tenuous to say the least.

For Processing fans, though, there’s various good news. First, Apple has updated Java 5, the version of Java targeted by Processing currently. Secondly, while JavaSound still lags behind major quality improvements made on Mac and Linux, if Apple really is abandoning Java on the Mac, it could mean the finger pointing is over and finally Sun could develop Java on the Mac platform, bringing all three desktop OSes in sync (sorry, Solaris, that’s Linux, Mac, and Windows for nearly all of us). Another interesting tidbit: JavaFX, if Sun is to be believed, could be more than a scripting language, it could provide better multimedia support long lacking in Java. I imagine that could be incorporated into Processing. See the CDM story for more details — taking them with a grain of salt, as none of this has been officially confirmed.

Rumor: Mac Java’s Demise is Real, and Why That Could Be Good News for Multimedia

For more on the creation of the new VISP visual app, there’s a terrific story by creator Michael Creighton at Adobe Edge:

Building a visual performance app with Adobe AIR, Flex, and Flash

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:

Artemis Tutorial

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.)