Projection mapping has been a running theme here, as visualists are dying to get their projections onto objects other than flat walls. If you’re ready to experiment and develop new material but have been intimidated by figuring out how to properly calibrate your projections, videoprojection tools is for you. This free Mac/Windows tool built in helps align videos with objects. It was built in Max/MSP/Jitter but runs whether or not you own Max thanks to the included runtime. (I’d love to port some of the same techniques to Processing! See also vvvv, as linked below.)

Not only can anyone try their hand at projecting onto objects with videoprojection tools, but a new v3 release brings some powerful new features:

• 8 layer support
• Cornerpin distortion
• Advanced masking features
• 8 individual video sources, 1 live video source, 1 draw source

This is on top of its extensive preset and sequencing system. Ready-to-use on your Mac OS X or Windows (XP/Vista) system, for free.

For graphics cards, drivers are everything: it’s just not possible to be on top of stability, performance, and functionality without access to new, stable drivers. But for Windows notebooks, unlike desktops, traditionally you had to turn to OEM PC vendors to get your NVIDIA graphics drivers. That would be fine, if PC vendors kept pace, but my near-universal experience has been that vendors are awful about drivers. Just finding drivers on many sites is a Herculean task, let alone getting something up-to-date.

That had meant that, for GPU gurus, the only alternative was a site like laptopvideo2go.com. That site is an awesome resource, with in-depth detailed descriptions of every new build (stable and experimental) from NVIDIA. To get the latest and greatest, you can use mods that allow these drivers to be installed on notebooks without having to go through your notebook vendor.

But nice as that is, it’s still terrific news that NVIDIA has finally made the switch to offering their drivers directly on their site. Now, when you go to NVIDIA.com, you get a prominent, front-page option for downloading notebook drivers:

NVIDIA Notebook Drivers

This covers just about everything, thanks to NVIDIA’s unified driver model. (NVS and GeForce are both there.) Notably missing: workstation-quality Quadro FX drivers. But this is still major progress. Both 32-bit and 64-bit Vista and XP are covered.

This is a non-issue for Apple users, of course, and NVIDIA has long offered direct downloads for Linux (in addition to open source, community-supported drivers), but it’s great news for Windows users.

It specifically allows NVIDIA to push the beta of release 179 before the certified drivers become available. I hope this also means that, with added feedback, we’ll get more reliable NVIDIA mobile drivers.

NVIDIA also now prominently links to their Graphics Plus campaign, which promotes the use of your GPU for tasks like GPGPU and PhysX. There are tons of downloads there, though in the past those haven’t been officially supported on notebooks; with the beta, they are. I’m giving them a try later today on my NVIDIA 9500M GT to how they run with this new beta driver release. One big bonus for visualists: a chance to get faster video encoding. Being a fan of open standards, I’m still rooting for OpenCL in place of NVIDIA’s proprietary CUDA technology for processing on the GPU, but there’s no question NVIDIA does a lot to promote the science of GPU use. (And, for the record, NVIDIA has also pledged to support and promote OpenCL alongside CUDA.)

In fact, NVIDIA is specifically pushing these new notebook drivers for these features:

• Video applications
• Distributed computing (GPUGRID, Folding@home, and the like)
• PhysX in games like EA’s upcoming PC release of Mirror’s Edge (get the Dramamine handy!)

What about ATI? They helpfully let you select your notebook graphics card on the driver download page, then respond with:

Currently AMD does not provide any driver support for Mobility Radeon™ products. All driver and technical support for Mobility Radeon™ products is provided by the original laptop or notebook manufacturer. The drivers that are available for download at ati.amd.com are for desktop products only.

To download Windows Vista Mobility Radeon™ drivers or driver updates for your laptop or notebook product, please visit your laptop or notebook manufacturer’s website.

Ah, yes, because really, there’s nothing computer users enjoy more than dealing with notebook manufacturers. So, ATI, I hope you follow NVIDIA’s lead on this. If they can do it, so can you. We love your stuff, so help us run the latest drivers, okay? (By the way, does anyone know if there’s an ATI equivalent of laptopvideo2go?)

Thanks to Josh Ott (of superDraw fame) for the tip!

live in mannheim at bseite festival from mr monkeypresso on Vimeo.

[Advisory: some women with pasties in there.]

David, aka Mr. Monkeypresso, was also at Manheim’s B Seite visual fest. He sends along some documentation of his live set, which made use of some visual tools of which we’re already quite fond:

a small demo of my latest live visuals what i did in mannheim, at the great bseite festival. I used here for first time my soft. developed in quartz composer. Thanks for all who helped me in this (Kineme, Vade, Memo and more). And thanks for Benjamin Jantzen for the festival.

For some of those Quartz Composer Mac resources, see our previous story:

VDMX + Quartz Composer, in Free Video Tutorials

And you might want to specifically check out CDMo contributor vade’s own Cocoa/QC projects:

v002

Plus of course the Kineme plug-ins and tutorials:

Kineme Quartz Composer Stuff

And the always-awesome Memo Akten, with lots of eye candy and still more QC resources:

Memo.tv

I believe that coding is an essential skill for people making live digital visuals. At the same time, there’s no question that learning to code has been a big obstacle for visually creative people — especially as they have plenty of other things on their mind. You need somewhere to start, and you need to make the learning curve manageable. Processing has been a great tool for doing that, but the point isn’t to learn Processing — it’s to learn how to code.

For that reason, I’m thrilled that Dan Shiffman’s book Learning Processing is now in print and available. I’ve been waiting for this for some time. There are already a couple of great books out there for Processing, but Dan’s book is unique in that it’s entirely focused on teaching you to code visuals step by step, even if you haven’t coded before. Dan teaches coding to creative-minded non-coders at NYU’s ITP program, and the book comes out of that teaching technique.

I know the book very well as I served as a technical editor during its development. We’ll be running an exclusive set of excerpts this week, but here’s a look at what’s included:

• Basics of code structure, pixels, interaction, and fundamentals like how the coordinate system works
• Using arrays to make lots of stuff appear on the screen, including particle systems
• Basics of images, video, data, and networking
• How to use object-oriented programming to make coding easier and more efficient
• Extending Processing with Java and more advanced coding techniques

By the time you’re done, you’ll be processing pixels, drawing generative visuals, and writing well-organized code.

To me, one of the real strengths of this book for teaching and learning is its strong emphasis on object-oriented programming, in a way people can actually understand. Explained properly, objects can really help keep your code clean. For some reason, this is often viewed as an “advanced” concept, but on the contrary, I’ve found using objects actually helps keep beginners from getting tripped up. And, to put it in visual terms, understanding objects is a terrific skill for getting lots of glitzy eye candy up on the screen.

Here’s what Dan has to say about the book (emphasis mine):

My goal for “Learning Processing” was to write something for the complete and total programming beginner. If you’ve never written a line of code before in your life, but want to get started creating your own digital media tools then I wrote this book for you. There are several other wonderful Processing books out there and I hope mine will complement them nicely. A special thanks to Casey, Ben, and Ira who kept encouraging and inspiring me as their books were being published.

The book is also geared towards the teacher. It’s not my belief that such a person will necessarily learn any new skills from the book (assuming they have a programming background), however, my hope is that the book will encourage and help facilitate the teaching of programming. It is structured with 10 lessons (complete with examples and exercises) and can act as a ready-made syllabus for a beginner interactive media / programming class. In fact, the book is modeled exactly on ITP’s Introduction to Computational Media course.

The book is available on Amazon.com. It shows out of stock, but those kind of screw-ups are common when a book has just come out (speaking as a published author here).

Stay tuned for those excerpts later this week; I’m editing them now!

See also: Dan Shiffman’s blog, Facebook Page, Official Site, free download of TOC and first chapter

MediaCoder is a free do-everything, convert-everything audio and video batch processor. It relies on tools like ffmpeg behind the scenes, but supports multiple engines, lots of formats, and has a graphical front end. It works on Windows, and could be a good reason to virtualize Windows on Mac or Linux, and it also evidently works pretty well on Mac and Linux via WINE. (Haven’t tried that yet; see the download page for details.)

The best news from MediaCoder land is that a recent build has added support for AVCHD, the widely-used HD format. This is essential for those times you get media off someone’s hard drive-based player. The MediaCoder folks have a brief tutorial with screenshots on their site:

How to convert AVCHD with MediaCoder

If you have a preferred conversion method for AVCHD or other formats on your platform of choice, let us know. In the meantime, I’m finding I fire up MediaCoder almost every day.