artificialeyes are keeping us updated on the impending release of 3L (current status: Soon), and while I’m still in “getting my studio in order” mode in the lead-up to the “2008 massive VJ geek-out and CDMoFest” and unable to play with new toys, CyberPatrolUnit has posted some great demo videos (and followup), showing us some of the places that 3L may be able to take us.
Exciting? Maybe a little. I still have lots of 3L video to edit from Perth last year, and I’ve promised Michael that I’ll have some videos ready for the official launch. Stay tuned!
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.
Resolume 3 Breaking News: Mac Compatible, Freeframe OpenGL, More -
We will have more extensive coverage of this coming very soon as Toby*Spark brings us a write-up of the Node08, Mapping and Vision’R festivals.
However, for those who like their news to be the breakingest: Le Collagiste has some stills and video of Resolume 3 at Vision’R, running natively in OS X on a Macbook Pro! [Ed.: In case you're not clear why that's big news, this version goes cross-platform after a formerly Windows-only existence.] The next version of Resolume also includes audio playback and other tasty treats. No word yet on a release schedule, but this looks like an upgrade worth waiting for. (Thanks Jasper).
Ed.: Here’s a teaser video of Resolume 3 from our friends at Le Collagiste, with some fleeting glimpses of the new UI, as part of their French-language write-up of the presentation.
Gavin Morris has been working on an audiovisual setup with Ableton Live and Isadora, a tasty combination for any Windows or Mac user. Isadora, for those of you who don’t know, is a visually-focused modular patching tool. It’s similar to tools like Max/MSP/Jitter, but by emphasizing the practical needs of visual performance, it’s unusually usable when putting together real-world gigs. Its use by A/V dance troupe Troika Ranch (co-founder Mark Coniglio is also the tool’s creator) has also popularized it in modern dance circles.
Gavin has two tutorials for us to start. The first syncs up Live and Isadora, along the lines we ran here using Live by momo the monster:
It’s similar to Momo’s recent Tutorial but uses a free tool for the VST (Pluggo) and allows control from the Live interface (as opposed to within the VST) This allows you a lot more flexibility and means you can use Follow Actions, adjust loop lengths/positions in realtime and even create a slicer. It is Live>Isadora via OSC but could equally be to many other softwares and could equally use MIDI.
Gavin warns us that the video may "put us off." At first I thought that meant it was NSFW or something, but … well, that’s not the problem. You’ll see. I leave it up to you to decide how you feel about it.
The second tutorial gives you the power of Emergency Broadcast Network-style A/V slicing:
I’ve done a tutorial for a Video Slicer - synching up Live’s slicer to Isadora - same technique but a bit of maths to convert the midi notes Live creates to video position. You can make some quite glitchy s***!
Good as this is, I hope we see some audiovisual setups that work with more asynchronous relationships between music and motion — I know my own tastes for my personal work tend in the abstract. Maybe I’ll have to put my money where my mouth is and write it up myself.
I’m sure I’m not the only visualist to have been inspired by Autechre’s Gantz Graf video, nor the only person to have watched it and though “some day, we will be able to do that in realtime”:
This is created realtime in VDMX from a quartz composer generator, controlled by 9-band audio analysis, and topped off with a very nice little effects chain.
A few people have mentioned they don’t get the same look when they use the QTZ file, this is because the QTZ file renders with very basic shading and there is quite a bit of post done in VDMX. The Effects I’m using (from top to bottom) are:
Serpia Tone (100%, Source Atop)
Shaded Material (0-40% tied to audio analysis, Soft Light)
City Lights (100%, Source Atop)
Bloom (100%, Screen)
I’ve also got a 9-band audio analysis going on, with different frequencies driving all the parameters of QTZ. You can just setup the frequencies randomly and it will do pretty cool stuff to almost any song (see http://www.memo.tv/amoeba_dance_v1_5 for an example!!), but it is best to taylor the frequencies to the specific song…
Memo shares the GLSL code and the QTZ file on his site, which contains some interesting nuggets of QC, Actionscript, Processing and other codey goodness. PK: Because this uses GLSL which runs in any OpenGL environment, you could also port the geometry stuff to Processing, Max/MSP/Jitter, Pd/GEM, or (with some adjustments) even things like vvvv, etc. — no need for Quartz Composer per se.
For all of the other CDMo readers who are doing cool things, don’t wait for us to find you: Hit the comments or the contact page and tell us what you’re up to!
Soon you’ll be gaping at this interface in awe, wondering what to do next. So I hope you’ve read the manual!
Those of you who didn’t win, don’t fret! You will soon be receiving an invitation from artificialeyes to join the 3L mailing list, so you’ll be among the first to know when the commercial release happens. Stay tuned for more 3L information as the software nears release, and those lucky Beta winners, please tell us when you have some 3L output available online for others to see!
Thanks to everyone who ran the system spec gauntlet and proudly entered our 3L Beta Giveaway. We’ll draw and announce the winners on Monday when ExiledSurfer and I have finished our respective travel itineraries.
In the meantime, for those who would like to get a head start on the 3L interface, artificialeyes have released the manual for public consumption (Download link: 1.2MB PDF).
When you open that file, you’ll be confronted with the following image.
Sage advice. artificialeyes have made some very interesting interface design choices with this software, and while they’ve packed a huge amount of control and signal flow functionality into a single screen interface, few would accuse it of being intuitive. Even with Michael and Todd showing you through the system it’s still quite confusing, and takes some time for the 3L paradigm to sink in. So for those 5 new beta testers hitting the software on Monday, getting a head start on the manual will have you blasting pixels out smoother and faster.
Good luck! As the commercial release of 3L approaches I’m sure we’ll have more exciting news coming.
Hang tight — we will have that announcement here. It’s Monday in New York for another few hours. -Ed.
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.
Hi, everybody — well, it seems quite a lot of you have MacBook Pros, as we’ve got a huge response to our 3L giveaway. WordPress is aggressively moderating comments, so I just wanted to say, please don’t fret if your comment doesn’t appear immediately. We’ll get them, and anything that gets in before the giveaway expires counts (they’re all time-stamped). You should see it within 12 hours at the most (if both Jaymis and I happen to be out, etc.) There’s still time if you want to post. Reply on the original story, por favor:
It’s been 2 months since artificialeyes announced their new Mac-only visualist tool 3L ("Thrill"). The ae guys have just pushed out a new beta release, updated the 3L manuals, posted a new features page with screenshots, and the word from Michael is that the commercial release will happen as soon as they have the infrastructure in place for selling it.
To further whet your appetite, over 100 free VJ loops created with 3L have been posted to archive.org:
… and leading by example, they have also released two content DVDs on VMS. These feature content generated almost entirely in 3L and are designed to be used with the VMS Video Moving Systems.
Hungry? Well, how would you like a main course of "Free 3L Private Beta" to go with that? artificialeyes have provided CDMo with five invitations to give away. The beta group is currently under 50 people, so this isn’t your average web2.0 style "put it out there and call it a beta so we don’t have to make it stable" software release.
Before you go putting up your hand, however, there are some conditions. Most importantly: You’ll need a machine which is capable of running 3L.
2.33GHz Intel based MacBook Pro or Mac Pro running:
OSX 10.4.1 or later (leopard included)
Quicktime 7.2 or later
Minimum screen resolution 1440 x 900 pixels
2Gb RAM
256Mb VRAM ATI or NVIDIA video card
If you can tick those boxes, then all you need to do is leave a comment on this post (edit: Entries are now closed. Winners will be announced on Monday). Entries will be open for 72 hours, then we will randomly select 5 people to join this exclusive group of visual visionaries beating their graphics chips into submission. Those who have been chosen will receive a beta invitation, and the others will receive an invitation to join the 3L mailing list (opt-in, of course).
If you miss out, don’t fret. The pricing for 3L - €200, €150 for students - is very competitive, and I’m sure that artificialeyes will keep us in the loop on their release progress.
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Bart from Resolume has posted some details of the release of FreeFrame 1.5, including OpenGL-based FreeFrameGL:
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2008-Apr-21@20:24
