Ohm64 Backlight Control from Livid Instruments on Vimeo.

It’s been a long time since I touched Livid’s VJ software. But when it comes to hardware, they’ve been doing unbelievable work that could have Resolume and VDMX and Processing and vvvv and Max users turning their heads.

The Ohm64 looks simply fantastic. It’s got an ideal configuration for a lot of live visual applications, with 8×8 triggers and plenty of faders and knobs to go along with them. It’s also finally a controller that’s well-made but doesn’t cost a fortune – you get a well-crafted device made by the people who designed it in Texas, but at $599, it’s still affordable.

Visualists are doing all kinds of new things to expand their performance, so I believe having a truly open controller is essential. The Ohm64 delivers, with a chip and editor software that have extensive open support. That means that, as with the brilliant monome controller, you should see a community that experiments with creative ideas for how to use it. (Nor do I think this is necessarily monome competition – the monome is still beautiful for its minimalism, whereas this should appeal to people who ignored the monome because they needed knobs and faders for additional parameter control.)

For visual software increasingly using OSC, a future firmware update should provide native OSC support (and possibly even DMX in the near future). For everything else, there’s MIDI support now. And unlike the Akai APC40, that means real MIDI support, with actual MIDI in and out ports and endlessly customizable controller assignments and LED feedback, instead of the Akai’s single USB port and permanently-fixed layout. And this is fully bus-powered, so you’re not screwed if you forget your power brick.

I did a full preview for CDMusic. But next week I should get to try one in person, which is the real test.

Livid Ohm64

http://www.lividindustry.com/culture/ blog with more videos

MIA-live glitch test from andrew benson on Vimeo.

Our friend Andrew Benson got the attention of MIA here on Create Digital Motion with his real-time glitch creations in Max/MSP/Jitter. Andrew shares some stories from the road with a detailed gig report from Coachella, which reveals a bit of what goes on backstage at these shows. I also really enjoy this clips, because lots of techniques that were once typically pre-rendered or assembled as static motion graphics clips are increasingly applicable in real-time. That makes for an extended palette for visualists – and very good times ahead.

Here’s Andrew – a rough and uncut diary, but with lots of juicy details as a result. The big revelation: we need to get out there and evangelize doing things live, with artists major and obscure alike.

What if one environment blended the code goodness of Processing with visual programming metaphors and patches, creating a single world for high definition video and OpenGL-powered 3D, with friendly-looking HyperCard-style inspectors, live coding, extensible graphical elements everywhere, an open-ended canvas, drawing with splines and images…

In other words, what if you could make anything, more easily?

That’s the vision of Field, a new authoring environment built on Java and Jython (Python on the Java VM). It’s Mac-only, with other platforms possible in the future (the underlying libraries are largely cross-platform, and apparently there’s the beginnings of a Windows build somewhere).

I asked Nick Rothwell to describe what it was about. Nick is collaborating with creator Marc Downie on choreographic generation and visualisation tools for Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance Company at Sadler’s Wells in London. Wayne, in turn, is choreographer in residence at the Royal Opera House and has worked on the Harry Potter Movies.

And Field can make your development environment feel, well, like a Muggle.

Field — Hybrid lines & code from OpenEndedGroup on Vimeo.

Here’s Nick’s capsule description:

Field is an open-source Mac-based media authoring system, built in Java by Marc Downie of the OpenEnded Group based on ideas formulated at the MIT Media Lab, and subsequently used for a variety of hi-def video installations and choreographic projects. It’s a graphical development environment attached to a high-resolution 3D OpenGL rendering engine, and applications are built on a display canvas with object boxes reminiscent of MaxMSP. But Field is different to MaxMSP because it’s language-based: the object boxes are individual containers of Python code, and the canvas is a flexible, scriptable interaction surface: Python code can draw on it using a 2D renderer, and user interactions and timing markers call back into the code.

There is a sophisticated editing environment for the code, and the canvas contents are version-controlled in a Mercurial repository which Field itself can inspect. Fieldis sufficiently self-referential to be regarded as a meta-environment: for example, click-and-drag editing operations on graphical elements cause Python code to be generated (and, of course, version-controlled). The text of the Python code itself can even contain embedded user interface components. Because Field is written in Java, it has access to all the Java libraries out there as well as portable Python libraries. Field can bridge to the Processing environment, allowing Processing to be scripted in Python and animated using Field’s canvas timelines and user interface components.

Jack Lykins sends us a really amazing video he assembled using Ms. Pinky, the vinyl control system, and its included Maxi-Patch Max/MSP/Jitter patch to control animation interactively. We’ve seen vinyl triggering and controlling video, of course – as on the Serato VIDEO-SL, previously reviewed here. But there’s something about Jack’s style of “narrative” animation on the turntable that’s really compelling.

Hope to see more of this setup.

Previously:

Hands-on Review: Serato’s VIDEO-SL for Visual Vinyl Turntablism

Musician Christopher Willits has an ongoing series for XLR8R Magazine in which he talks his own technical workflow. In the latest episode, he adds live visuals to his Ableton Live set using Max/MSP/Jitter. What’s nice about this is you see how some clever mapping can make visuals integrate neatly with music.

I’m somewhat insane, so my own setup often involves simultaneously running visuals separately with no communication with my music software. That allows me to set up less-direct relationships between visuals and sound.

But, while the techniques could be combined to a variety of setups, this also serves as a nice introduction to how you might use patching in Jitter alongside your music software.

Curious to know what you think of the presentation and content here, as I hope we’ll do more videos like this ourselves.

What You Talkin’ Bout, Willits? Part 10 [XLR8R]