A bank of faders, a touchpad, and then … it just does anything you want. Even today, the idea of a fully-integrated visual instrument is a pretty profound concept. Ableton’s creators thought about the design of the Synclavier digital synth (the rival of the CVI’s music sibling, the CMI) when designing their software. At least a couple of you have some strong ideas about the future of "visual instruments" and live visualism in general. Certainly, I’ll be thinking about the CVI as I look at the setup of my live visual rig. The effects themselves on the CVI don’t all date well, especially after the CVI itself popularized their use (and overuse) in the 80s. But the elegance of the design as interface can still inspire.

Co-creator Peter Vogel has kept satisfying our appetite for gems from his VHS library. Thanks, Peter, for saving these from permanent deterioration. Top: watch a BBC host get a kick out of turning herself into a video star. Bottom: the original demo video, which gives a good overview of the effects capabilities. (Especially interesting, as students and artists learn to recreate some of the same effects from scratch in tools like Max/MSP/Jitter and Processing.) Tomorrow’s world, indeed.

This brief video, uploaded to YouTube by Fairlight co-founder and designer Peter Vogel himself, gives a brief history of the development of Fairlight’s legendary video hardware, the CVI. The CVI was a theoretical (in name, at least) visual counterpart to the ground-breaking CMI digital sampler instrument. And, like the CMI, the CVI had a major impact on artists and produced some of the best digital creation of the 80s — and some of its most-repeated cliches.

Vintage Fairlight Computer Music Instrument Videos [Retro Thing; see also Create Digital Music]

But here’s an important difference: has the evolution of visual hardware and software really equaled what’s happened since the CMI on the sound side? Music hardware and software has evolved and exploded since the CMI. The only real visual hardware today available to consumers that’s not a mixer is Roland’s CG-8, and it’s arguably narrower in scope than the CVI, despite being two decades newer. Even in software, the idea of a visual instrument you can play is still evolving. Now, I suppose you could argue visualists have more to play with — powerful 3D capabilities, for one — but perhaps that’s why visual gear has been slow to catch up.

What do you think? Is there a visual - musical cap in digital tech? Or am I trying to compare two things that really can’t be compared, whether Australian designers gave them parallel acronyms or not?

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.

Ok, maybe not the last. But I’m proud to say I actually worked on this video, sweating, printing and gluing for hours on end. Directed by Asif Mian. Fast Cars turned out absolutely great. You can find a higher resolution quicktime on Asif Mian’s site here. It helps that im a huge Aesop Rock fan as well.

While we’re on the subject of animated pieces of paper: Switchfoot’s “Awakening” has been treated to a similar workflow (frames printed and photographed) with a very different result.

StudioDaily has an interview with Brandon Dickerson, on the workflow required to put this piece together.

Ways of adding a second layer of animation to a video:

1. Composite them digitally. Use lots of tricks, like match moves, to line everything up.
2. Print each individual frame onto paper (4,133 in this case), tack them up to stuff, and video the results into a time-lapse video.

Max Tyrie chose the latter for the Modest Mouse video contest. This is probably beyond the wildest dreams of what Modest Mouse’s promoters hoped for. Viva viral. It’s funny that, as digital technology progresses, people are discovering new, more “analog” means of producing visuals.

Via the excellent Wooster Collective:
Shit We’re Diggin’: Max Tyrie’s Hand Made Modest Mouse Video

Studio Daily has a sneak peek video of the new Magic Bullet Looks - a plugin for After Effects and other hosts, as well as a standalone application for applying ‘looks’ to footage. The Magic Bullet Looks workflow is quite innovative, and when you see it, you’ll probably have a ‘why didnt I think of that’ moment - see for yourself, I wont give it away. While not geared for visualists in any sense, its definitely a useful tool (as are almost all Magic Bullet plugins), but it got me thinking a bit about the standard metaphors for working with live video, effects chains, mixer buses and the like.

I really like the simplicity of Magic Bullet Looks. Im curious what innovative work flows could be made for working with live footage. Any suggestions or applications for mixing live that have given you pause for their workflow and interface?

Check out Magic Bullet Looks at Studio Daily

My significant other, who aside from working for a major art museum is an authority on good taste (or at least things that taste good, which is far more important to me), let me know this video even wins cred among art historians:

You’ll recall that way back in 1991, we were all pretty blown away by morphing. Now, in 2007, we’re not really wowed by anything. Not even 3D. It’s used to beautiful effect here, though, which teaches us several things: one, you can see more easily how the radical modernist 20th Century painters were still rooted in classical ideas of female beauty, two, girls are awfully pretty, and three, morphing has reached the masses, and not just weird videos where Michael Jackson wigs out and starts smashing things.

I think when the novelty wears off an effect is when things start to get interesting — when we start to, you know, actually start to look at stuff.

As I expected, Wikipedia even has a history of digital morphing. To me, the canonical first appearance credit has to go to the movie Willow, at least as a first major cinematic application of the technique as we now know it. Two decades later, you can do it in After Effects. And with things like optical flow analysis popping up in places like Final Cut Studio, I expect some of these techniques will filter into less literal applications, used to transform visuals in subtler or more unpredictable ways.

Morphing memories you want to share? Own a car that Michael Jackson smashed? Let us know.

I’ve had a bit more time now with my (still shiny, still new) Numark AVM02 - or “Avmo” as it’s been dubbed by my bandmates - and have some more thoughts to offer, if you will hear them. If you haven’t heard the original thoughts or seen the unboxing photos you may like to check out my “First Impressions” review.

Obviously the biggest question I’m going to get is “how does it compare to the Edirol V4″, so I’ll come out straight away and disappoint those who are looking for that comparison: This article will focus mostly on the AVM02’s own strengths and weaknesses, and while some comparisons to the V4 and other video mixers may be drawn, you’ll have to make your own conclusions at this stage. I will be doing a full head to head features-and-quality shootout vodcast in the coming weeks, so I’ll save the serious V4 comparisons until then.

Unit Specs

The AVM02 combines a basic DJ mixer with what I guess could be described as a “DJ Style” video mixer, and is able to combine 4 Video channels and 4 Stereo Audio channels, mixing with independant (but linkable) Video and Audio crossfaders.