During the high-definition wars, your feelings about new higher-capacity storage discs may have ranged from ambivalence to dread to simple disinterest. (Well, that’s how I felt, anyway.) But with Blu-ray triumphant comes this realization: "hey, brain, we’ve suddenly got increasingly-affordable ways of burning high-capacity media!" Drive upgrades on the PC side cost what DVD burners once did, and if you’re hooked up to a TV, the writer can be your player, too. (There’s already a Lite-On internal drive for around US$350, and I expect these prices will plummet as production ramps up.)

That’s burning, anyway — authoring is obviously essential.

Guitar Hero? We want VJ Hero. And the AV Arcade Table, now part of the Boredbrands Digital Funfair, is exactly what you’d want it to be like.

It’s got the hardware — a DIY, cocktail-style arcade table, just the like the one you spent playing Ms. Pac-Man on, slightly drunk.

It’s got the software — a Windows PC running VJAMM.

And it’s got the content — Guitar Hero and Rock Band have rock classics, so this has some classic clips from VJs.

Official description:

The AV Arcade Table is a simple hybrid, a table top arcade cabinet that has been converted to run Vjamm, the best Audio Visual VJ Software by miles! Using the joystick and buttons 2 people can trigger audio visual samples and create beautiful collaborative audio visual collage/ a chaotic mess** (delete as appropriate!).

The Table was originally created for Cybersonica 2007 and was featured as part of “Soundwaves” at Kinetica Museum

Thanks to Eclectic Method, Exceeda, Hexstatic and Vjamm All Stars for supplying content.

AV Arcade Table @ Boredbrands Digital Funfair

Incidentally, reasons to give some props to VJAMM, even in this overcrowded world of VJ apps, and even though everyone went out and bought MacBook Pros last week, it seems:

• Coldcut uses VJAMM. I mean, celebrity matters little to us here, but they do use it well, and that counts.
• The Novation SL line of keyboards supports Automap in VJAMM. (It’s England, so I’m guessing that idea got worked out over a pint — which is certainly the way I like to make deals.)
• They have this cheery slogan on their website: “VJamm3 is the world’s leading audiovisual instrument, the ultimate tool for sound and image mixing, the true 21st century artform, the new hip-hop.”
• This table

Thanks to Gav for the tip — great work, mate! And to all readers of CDM: go for the shameless plugs. There’s no shame in it. We love to see the cool stuff you’re doing.

The Mac may be in the spotlight these days, but Windows may boast the broadest access to freeware and open source tools for live visuals.

The latest edition: VisualJockey, as pointed out (alongside other free Windows tools) by beatfix on comments.

VisualJockey: Real-time Animation

You get a pretty powerful set of tools in this app, first introduced in 1999:

• Full Windows support, including Vista
• Alpha support throughout; image, AVI, QuickTime file format compatibility
• Global keystone capability
• MIDI, multi-monitor support
• Compatible with FreeFrame plug-ins (open plug-in spec for visuals)
• Sound beatmatching, internal LFOs with lots of waveshapes
• Generators for particles, patterns
• 2D color filtering, effects, blue screen
• 20+ transitions or custom bitmap transitions
• 3D support for 3DS import, primitives, 3D animation
• Export to AVI (which means it can double as an editor)

In fact, VisualJockey’s approach I think is unique — a set of tabs controlling different approaches, a hybrid blend of other interface paradigms. Want a timeline? A reactive sound system? A modular, generative 3D patch? It’s all in there. The UI is decidedly retro, and you get more flexibility from true modular patching environments, but at this price, if you feel like you want another tool in your belt, it’s hard to resist. And with export, this could be handy to have around alongside your existing tool of choice.

But VisualJockey is just the start — here are a few more from beatfix (and me):

“It’s … alive! ALIIIIVEEE!!! They said I couldn’t do it. They said I was mad. They said I couldn’t cram an entire “broadcast workstation” into a laptop, with jog wheel and faders! But my creation liiiiives!”

Yes, this one’s truly a monster. It’s a Windows laptop. It’s a video controller, with buttons and jog wheel. And it’s a mixer: four video channels video plus six channels audio. At the very least, it’d solve Jaymis’ gig rig troubles. This one box does it all. Of course, you’ll have to go to Korea to buy it, and part with 10,000,000(KRW). Wait a second. I have no idea how much that is. (Hang on, currency conversion … US$10,786.78, which actually isn’t all that bad if it works. Yeah, enough with that $100 laptop, one laptop per child, whatever. Let’s talk $10,000 laptop — one laptop per visualist.)

XENO Website (look for CCTOP in the bottom right corner, if it’s still there)

Via: AVING USA: All-in-one broadcasting equipment ‘UCCTOP Xeno’

Naturally, the internal mixing capabilities mean this little workstation can be an all-in-one video studio, on location. (Sony has done something similar, as mentioned in comments.) XENO is pushing the Internet broadcasting angle, as in this diagram.

I’m embarrassed not to know any more about this beautiful beast. If our South Korea-connected readers could clue us in, it’d be much appreciated.

Thanks to Joshua Ellis for the tip!

No, it’s not from Gridiron, and it doesn’t do any of the cool preview rendering, but BG Renderer, from the AE Enhancers forum, does do background rendering, for free!

Using the power of After Effects scripting, it opens a terminal or command line window to background render any queued items.

It also had the added advanced feature to launch more than 1 instance at a time. If you have a multi-processor machine, you can launch as many instances as you have cpu’s. In my testing, this cut render times in half on a Quad G5 using 4 intances. (having at least 1 GB of ram per instance launched is recommended).

There’s lots of error checking behind the scenes so I did some beta testing to make sure it doesn’t have any bugs, but as always please share anything (good or bad) that you encounter.

The Processing gang have just released a new version. Syntax changes and bugfix details are here, and there’s a new thread on tutorials and resources in the Processing forum.

Download link! Or of course you could just start Processing, it will tell you all about the download page.

via Random Etc