Cat hit up the Amoeba Dance comments with a link to Sanch TV’s work in vvvv.
Apart from some smooth motion and subtly textured shapes, Sanch is also collaborating on an AV act “Va”, with quad-screen visuals:
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”:
I think we’re still quite a way off, but the latest project to set my mind thinking along these lines is Amoeba Dance - Caliper Remote (and the followup, Amoeba Dance with Mad Girls,) by CDMo reader Memo:
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.
He also maintains a VDMX and Quartz Composer repository: http://vdmx.memo.tv/.
Awesome work, and more to come it seems.
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!
Vade posted about the extremely sexy content-aware image resize “Seam Carving” a little over a month ago, and implementations for Gimp, Photoshop and a web2.0ish version - rsizr - are now available.
The rsizr.com server’s being hammered a bit at the moment, so the “Save†function takes rather a long time to work. It’s easy enough to get around that, though - once you get your image the way you want, just take a screenshot of the window and cut the image out of it.
(I presume there’ll be a decent free Photoshop-plugin image carver Real Soon Now. In other news, one of the guys who came up with the idea has been hired by Adobe.)
Via Dan.
Comments 1. By Jaymis. 
2007-Oct-03@13:27. Jonas of General Specialist seems to have been on a little holiday, but he’s back with two rapid-fire tips for those mixing “real” 3D into their After Effects:
Despite its name, the new version 2.0 of MAX2AE actually goes both ways, letting you start your designs in After Effects and at a later stage import the AE cameras and lights into 3ds max for further work, and then re-import into AE again.
Do you hate to go back and forth between your 3D app and After Effects, just to tweak the lighting so that it will match your composite? If you render out a quick normal map, you can easily and quickly move and change the lighting of your 3D renders.
Now there’s a free alternative to the commercial ZBornToy and WalkerFX Channel Lighting. Stefan Minning has kindly released a set of plugins for free, called Normality & Reality, so check them out.
Comments 0. By Jaymis. 2007-Feb-08@09:21. 
Previously mentioned After Effects turbocharger Gridiron Nucleo Pro has been discounted from $495 to $395. Still a little steep for the indie, but considerably less a little steep, which is nice.
A combination of frenetic CDM backend design work and all of my clients finally giving me materials 2 weeks before I leave to holiday in Vietnam has kept me from writing, and for that I apologize. Peter has or course kept up the fantastic content, but there is some more material which needs to be spread around and I can’t see any time to write full news posts before I leave. So here it is condensed, and almost editorialization free:
Open Source Film Footage: Stray Cinema
Stray Cinema is an online community where you are able to download and re-edit the raw footage from a film we have shot in London. This will provide people from all over the world with an opportunity to create their own version of the film. Stray Cinema will navigate the film experiment out of the online digital world, into the ‘real world’ with a screening of the top five films in London. The footage shot in London is the first of many open source films to be provided by Stray Cinema.
Lost in Light will transfer 8mm to digital for free* (so why don’t you shoot some 8mm).
Here’s a fresh new way to composite externally rendered 3D images in After Effects. The plug-in ZbornToy takes grayscale depth maps and magically let’s you continue tweaking and change many parameters from within AE.
Tasty 3D Business: Behind HP’s “Hands” commercials. Java-based 3D sketching. Fine art 3D rendering, and more.
Adobe’s November Plug-in Guide: The November version of the Plug-In Guide is now available. It contains listings of all known plug-ins for InDesign, Acrobat and Illustrator. Categories include Shrink-Wrap, Catalog & Database, Newspapers, and Freelancers.
Looping Fractal Noise: Fractal Noise is the swiss army knife of AE plugins. Newbies may pass over it because of the cheezy default plugin look, but seasoned pros can use it for anything which requires random or organic movement and looping motion; clouds, flame, water, slime, morphs
Beaming Up effect in AFX.
Hidden Illustrator<->Photoshop integration
Background: The compositing model (i.e. the layer blending modes & options) used by Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat is different than the one used by Photoshop. Therefore some blending options in Photoshop (for example, complex “Blend If” settings) can’t be replicated in Illustrator. As a result, when you place a PSD file into Illustrator, the blending is isolated. That is, the PSD is treated as things a little world unto itself, and the blending modes within it don’t interact with anything else in the Illustrator document. Objects like drop shadows (set to Multiply mode) only multiply against other things inside the PSD.
AE Keyframe Boomerang Effect: Part 1.
In this tutorial, Creative Cow Leader Aharon Rabinowitz shows you how to handle the annoying (and sometimes crippling) boomerang effect, in which a layer moves randomly between two spatial keyframes that are exactly the same.
Using After Effects 7 on Intel-Based MacPro Computers. Ed.: This one is interesting as an alternative to booting into Windows, but don’t get too excited: basically, you have to humble your Mac Pro into running Rosetta and find some way of not having the machine die. In the meantime, I have to admit, I’m getting more addicted to running the Adobe software on Windows, anyway — sorry, Apple. -PK
DIY: Building your own computer for Digital Video. Ed.: See also our DIY Shuttle XPC assembly, which is kind of the portable version of this — only cheaper, and I didn’t dress up like Darth Vader. This looks great as a desktop machine, however, and you’d be hard pressed to match bang-for-buck and customization on the Mac. -PK
The Rapture – “Whoo! Alright! Yeah Uh-Huh!”: Great animation, great motion tracking, great feel. Rocking clip.
RC plane with Remote Head-Mount Gyroscope-Controlled Camera Plane: We now officially live in The Future.
Nucleo is a plugin which speeds After Effects performance by using multiple processors or processor downtime to for preview and background rendering. From the Features:
Fast (Nucleo) Render
Supports rendering out to both sequences and movies in any format supported by After Effects.Fast (Nucleo) Preview Emulation
Allows you to specify which type preview you would like Nucleo to emulate, Standard (spacebar) Preview, RAM Preview, or Shift RAM Preview.Spec-Preview
As you create your composition Nucleo automatically and continuously renders it and fills in your AE RAM Cache. When you make a change Nucleo detects it and regenerates the frames.Spec-Render
As you create your composition Nucleo automatically and continuously renders it in the final output format. When you make a change, Nucleo detects it and regenerates the appropriate files.Background Render Queue
When you render using Nucleo’s background render queue, you can continue to work in After Effects, or any other application. Load the background render queue up with compositions from several different projects and Nucleo will let know when they have completed.Commit To Disk
If you have layers in your timeline that are complete but are costing you time when previewing, Nucleo allows you to commit those layers to disk. Simply select the layers and have Nucleo render only those layers out in the background. When the render is complete, the selected layers in your composition are non-destructively replaced with the rendered footage item.
CreativeCow’s Aharon Rabinowitz has posted a video review, outlining some techniques and a couple of his issues with the system. Anything which can speed your workflow and reduce rendering downtime is fantastic. $495 is a little hefty for the independant VJ, but if you’re doing freelance post or video production the time it saves may be worth the dollars.
Freeframe, that great open-source video effects plugin system for your favourite VJ app or NLE (and championed by developers from VJamm and Resolume) now comes in a new flavour: After Effects!
BigFug (an active FreeFrame plugin developer) has released a beta of the After Effects Freeframe Host. It’s, well, free while in beta. The full version will cost money, however this money will let you run loads of free and commercial plugins. I’m not sure how this implementation differs from Pete Warden’s AFX Freeframe Host, as I don’t have it installed at the moment. But I shall do some testing and see how they stack up.
If you want to do some Freeframe testing of your own, here are some notable gratis ones to get you started:
VisualVinyl
BigFug’s Freeframe Plugins for Windows Freeframe Hoses
Syzygy StripShow
For an example of the incredibly expensive ones commercial plugins available, check out VJFX FreeFrame Pack v2.0. 50ish plugins for 75 euro, those capitalist pigs!
We continue to interrupt Moog Week for Weird Plugin Day. Forget parody plugins — truth is nearly as strange as fiction. Just watch the latest on KVR:
Turkish Folk Instrument goes Virtual: First, there’s the Volko Baglama (via). The thousand year-old Turkish folk instrument known as a Baglama or saz has been converted to Windows VSTi. Great; I can see it now: the master Baglama player shows up to a gig only to have been replaced by some youngster with an Oxygen8. (at least it doesn’t sound half bad.)
Great Plug-in? BS! The “unfortunate plug-in branding” award has to go to a developer named bismark, who calls his plugins things like “bs-16,” “bs-1,” and “bs-spectrum.” My suggested motto: “if you sound good, you must be full of BS.” And if you’ve been reading KVR really religiously, you know the BS-16 just fixed a problem with an infinite loop on some drum presets. Hey, we’ve all known drummers like that . . .
Now With Seizures! Of course, my favorite odd plugin of all time has to be the Hypnos Vocoder. Is it really capable of finding an entrainment frequency of your brain? Based on what I know as the kid of two psychologists, probably not without dedicated biofeedback hardware. But come on: what other DirectX plugin costs US$800 AND can cause a seizure? (Tom at MusicThing covered this in December while I was too afraid, but hey, always worth a mention.)
Boring bits: Windows VSTi, 8-voice polyphony, two
oscillators plus one noise generator, eight envelopes, 1 filter, 2
LFOs, built-in delay/chorus FX — all important, but you've seen it
before.
Cool bits: You can drawn in your wave shapes, and it's free. Now has NoteGraphica got your attention?
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