NAB, the “broadcasting” industry show, remains the event of the year for visual gear lust fantasies. We kicked off this week with new gear from Edirol, but that was just the beginning. Contributor Anton Marini (”vade”) weeds through the rest of the announcements for us, and finds some very tasty-looking equipment if you’re interested in getting HD video into your computer in real-time, or recording HD-resolution computer performances. The combination of this hardware with our faster-than-ever computers means that HD VJing and visualism is now more accessible than ever. -Ed.

NAB ‘09 is winding down, and there have been a slew of announcements of new products and upgrades that run the gamut of super high-end real-time 4K playback systems to.. well, not so high-end. I’ve tried to pick through the details and find the announcements that may help change the game for visualists in 2009/2010, for both high-end professional VJs and hobbyists alike.

The key word this year is HDMI.

AJA Ki-Pro

The Aja Ki-Pro is a field recorder. That’s a fancy way of saying it’s a stand-alone device that records audio and video to a hard drive. While Ki Pro is aimed more at higher-end production and post-production markets, it does allow visualists with the budget to do one thing we’ve all been wanting: Record your performances in HD, without compromise.

videoprojectiontools, the powerful and intuitive Max/MSP/Jitter-developed Mac and Windows tools for projection mapping, just got a nice update. The new version has OpenSoundControl (OSC) support - and yes, despite the “Sound” in the acronym, it’s really more like Open … Control. Max is not required to use the patches; they’re standalone.

Yet again we see some advantages of using OSC:

The implementation so far for OSC includes preset and cuelist access, and layer fades,pos x and y, scale x and y, and videotracks selection from the individual sources.
With OSC you can now sync several computers and trigger presets from a OSC-able application (which can run as a background application).

Head to the site for downloads, tutorials, and documentation to get you started.

Video projection tools

GPU HSFlow port to Quartz Composer from vade on Vimeo.

The Live Optical Flow Processing continues. Anton Marini, aka vade, is working on his own Quartz Composer patch, which will in turn be integrated with the visualist software he’s assembling, v002. More details once we get them, but you can see how nice parameterizing this in real-time can be. And once that software is out, you’ll hear about it.

A big thanks to Andrew Benson for inspiring all of this. More to come…

Optical Flow on GPU [abstrakt.vade.info]

Add Max patch effects to DNA. from Livid Instruments on Vimeo.

Yesterday, we saw some splashy video distortion techniques applied to real-time video. You know what that means: it’s time to use these in live performance.

Liquidify Video, Live: Optical Flow GLSL Datamosh Technique

Here’s one start.Peter Nyboer, Max whiz and Livid developer, has run with the idea of squishing around video using optical flow analysis, and shows you how to add the effect to Livid’s Cell DNA VJ app. For Jitter users, this means you can rely on Cell for quick access to video taps and files, while adding unusual effects built in Jitter to get your custom processing on, not only with this example but any other patches you’ve created. One little detail of Cell DNA I missed – it requires Max 4 patches, not Max 5 patches. Peter has also posted a tutorial for working with that, after the jump.

And yes, if none of this is really making sense to you, you can go download the files and just try it out – no need to fully grasp all of the internals straight away.

Don’t want to use Jitter and/or Cell? The guts of Andrew Benson’s video datasplooshing technique is an OpenGL (GLSL) shader, so it doesn’t even rely on Jitter – Jitter can just be a convenient environment for playing around with such things. There’s word we may see a Quartz Composer wrapper around this shader, which would make it easy to use with software like VDMX.

Oh, by the way, I’m officially rescinding my editorial ban on the term “datamoshing.” Why? Because it means absolutely nothing, and therefore can be declared reasonably harmless. Also, unlike the term “glitch,” it comes without any baggage. We therefore have a nice, nonsense term for making video all mushy and unpredictable – a good thing.

The folks at Resolume have been hard at work on a big update to the final 3.0 build just released. Bart says he just uploaded this to the server. Now, so far we’ve found the final build to be quite stable, so if you tried the crash-happy beta builds like the early adopter we know you are, now’s the time to revisit this.  Audiovisual recording is also working properly in 3.01, which looks to be a whole lot of fun. Saturday night I watched Devin aka mzo do an elaborate set mashing up the likes of Garbage Pail Kids: The Movie, in front of a room packed with the world’s top game developers. Resolume was rock-solid and performed beautifully throughout.

Here’s 3.01:

Resolume Download Page

This micro update fixes bugs, improves stability and handles corrupt video files better. Recording is fixed once and for all and it now records both audio and video! In the preferences you can enable and disable audio and video recording. We’ve had a lot of fun creating AV samples with the new recording and we hope you’ll enjoy it too.

Fixed Bugs
#540 [fixed] Record 0 bytes
#537 [fixed] Some audio files are distorted when playing backwards
#560 [fixed] Decks in wrong order
#551 [fixed] PC: Keystone and AddSubtract missing
#578 [fixed] HardLight mixer does not work
#543 [fixed] Wipe Down does not wipe all the way
#580 [fixed] OSX: Live input does not always work
#559 [fixed] Compositions list does not show the last item
#561 [fixed] Continue playback is not working with Audio clips
#557 [fixed] White txt on layer blend mode buttons
#562 [fixed] Audio Input channels are not saved correctly
#534 [fixed] BPM 120.50 not possible
#550 [fixed] Some Application Key Map "Deck" Keystrokes not working
#542 [fixed] Beatloopr doesn’t work until swithed to bpm or beats mode (aarrghh)
#545 [fixed] Speed of videoclip isn’t saved
#581 [fixed] Can’t change directory for ffgl & vst directories

Let us know what you think!