MediaCoder is a free do-everything, convert-everything audio and video batch processor. It relies on tools like ffmpeg behind the scenes, but supports multiple engines, lots of formats, and has a graphical front end. It works on Windows, and could be a good reason to virtualize Windows on Mac or Linux, and it also evidently works pretty well on Mac and Linux via WINE. (Haven’t tried that yet; see the download page for details.)

The best news from MediaCoder land is that a recent build has added support for AVCHD, the widely-used HD format. This is essential for those times you get media off someone’s hard drive-based player. The MediaCoder folks have a brief tutorial with screenshots on their site:

How to convert AVCHD with MediaCoder

If you have a preferred conversion method for AVCHD or other formats on your platform of choice, let us know. In the meantime, I’m finding I fire up MediaCoder almost every day.

Artists and visualists often want to work in 3D, as our world increasingly becomes saturated with 3D technology. But we may want to get their feet wet before making an investment in a massive program. Fortunately, we’re now blessed with free 3D tools — partly because industry heavyweights Google and Microsoft are so desperate for the Average Joe to populate their virtual worlds with 3D models.

First, Google acquired SketchUp, the fantastic, user-friendly 3D sketching tool. They made the basic version of SketchUp completely free. Unfortunately for visualists wanting to use videos in a VJ app or OBJ models in a Processing sketch, exporting requires the full version of the software. (On the other hand, it’s $500, a tiny fraction of that for academic users, and it is user friendly.)

Well, now you have yet another choice, courtesy your friends at Microsoft. Microsoft snapped up a 3D app of their own for their competing Virtual Earth product when they bought Caligari, creator of trueSpace back in February. Sure enough, like Google they’re making the tool free.

Now, I expect Microsoft is hoping you’ll spend countless hours making models of houses for Virtual Earth, not just using this as a cheapskate way of making 3D models for your visualist projects. But they’ll survive.

trueSpace itself could be a strong choice even if you had to pay for it. It has a rather lovely interface, and some powerful tools for modeling organic-looking shapes. You can also script complex generative, interactive procedural models. There’s even a real-time DirectX9 renderer, which I believe, with effort, could even make trueSpace your live tool. There are powerful export tools — something SketchUp tends to lack — and scripting options, so this could fit well into another workflow. And unlike SketchUp, trueSpace is a "real" 3D tool that does everything. Microsoft also gives you the full-blown tool for free, minus just a few add-ons like ray tracing. The only catch is that trueSpace is Windows-only.

trueSpace even stacks up nicely against some of the 3D heavyweights, with tools like a node editor, real-time 3D collaboration, and lots of rendering options that set it apart.

Of course, SketchUp and trueSpace are both proprietary, so the open source Blender is another option. Those with more 3D experience than me, I’d be curious to hear how you think trueSpace stacks up against Blender.

Caligari

Free trueSpace 7.6 sign-up

When you’re ready to learn the tool, the video tutorials are now completely free, too.

But the bottom line: 3D tools are becoming more accessible, in cost, power, and ease of use alike. And as more people dive into 3D interactive tools like vvvv or Processing, and VJ-focused apps like 3L add 3D object import, I think the third dimension may increasingly infect visualist work.

I’ve just posted a video to Vixid.Noisepages investigating the VJX’s Crop effect.

Vixid Crop Effect Automation from Create Digital Media on Vimeo. Music by pornophonique.

The movements in this video were controlled via VDMX (site | CDMo tag). I’ve been really enjoying VDMX’s modular interface as a method for quickly prototyping and testing midi control routings. The ability to create Waveforms, Oscillators and Sliders, and then link them together with Behaviour chains.

This all allows me to try out complex control routing and to switch parameters around quickly, without the hassle associated with patching environments such as PD or Max/MSP. VDMX isn’t the silver bullet for creating your own software midi interface - Max was needed to generate the discrete, precisely timed messages for my VJX Bullet Time tests - but it does give you the ability to quickly put together systems using audio reactivity, tempo, step-sequencing, and complex math-driven slider interactions.

If you’re already using VDMX, I’ve uploaded the above project (.zip file) for others to take for a spin, and hopefully modify.

If you haven’t given VDMX a spin, you can get the demo from Vixvox, and still load my project file.

Joshue Ott/superDraw +Ezekiel Honig live at monkeytown from superdraw on Vimeo.

I’m very excited about the music lineup we have planned for this Friday in New York at the CDM-curated evening of live audio and visuals – but the visual lineup should be a big draw, too. If you’re in New York, come say hi (and if not, hope to have more details on these projects for the rest of the planet soon):

• Joshue Ott creates live visuals with his homemade superDraw generative illustration tool
• Paris (Voltage Controlled) and Don Miller (No Carrier) create glitchy, lo-fi visuals from custom-created 8-bit visual software on Nintendo and Commodore systems
• vade and Mary Ann Benedetto will visualize and reinterpret geeky things (possibly the Linux kernel, data packets, or both) using custom code and Quartz Composer stuff — we should even see a free release of some of those tools in time for the gig, so stay tuned to CDM
• Bill Jones creates live cinematic worlds inspired by sci-fi noir

Where: The Hotel Pennsylvania, New York City (map); head to the main door, on your left is the entrance to Penn Pavilion and you should see a table there.

When: Friday, July 18 2008 – performances run 11pm – 2am

Cost: US$10 at the door. First come, first served. (free if you have a conference badge)

We Are Hacks: Music and Visual Performance at HOPE, NYC – Preview

http://www.thelasthope.org/

Facebook event page (RSVP if you’re coming! Also on Going.com)

Above: one of my favorite videos from superDraw (Processing-based) by Joshue Ott above, though it’s even better to see it in person with the live drawing capabilities. Below: all-custom 8-bit-style software generates visuals, via Paris.

Function Field System - PureData/GEM from Paris/VoltageControlled on Vimeo.

Peter and I have been having a serious love-in with Sony’s Vegas Video editing software this year. I’m a long-time Premiere user, but it hasn’t been getting a look in since I realised just how much faster it is for me to edit video with Vegas. I’ve had my eyes opened to the flow. Vegas lets you make edits, rearrange, delete, fade, and layer clips without interrupting playback. As a VJ, of course I’m used to “editing live”, so when I tried to go back to the play-stop-edit-play workflow of Premiere, it felt completely unnatural and archaic.

The one thing I’ve been missing is the tight integration between Premiere and After Effects. Vegas has some reasonably capable post-production tools, but as soon as things got beyond simple colour-correction or pan and scan, I would reach for After Effects, and things would get messy - exporting uncompressed AVIs, multi-layer exports… Unpleasant for everyone involved.

So, Peter and I were counting the ways we love Vegas, and I remarked that “if Vegas could save a file which could be imported in to AFX for post-production - absolute bliss”. I quickly followed this up with “it’s never going to happen”, and started to theorize about converting Vegas project files into XML to be then hacked into Premiere, while clicking around Vegas in a hopeful manner.

It’s a small release number, but I expect Modul8 users will want to pay attention to this one. New in 2.5.5 are various fixes and improvements, most notably restoring Flash SWF support removed from QuickTime. I hope other VJ apps will be able to do the same.

Also in this update:

• Swatches, color picker for layer colorization
• Transformation knob for layer field of view
• Audio fading with layer opacity (neat idea!)
• Unlimited size for multi-output windows
• Media triggering by name
• Lots of other small fixes and features

Modul8 2.5.5 Feature Details

Read on in the forum, and you can find the fix that allowed GarageCUBE to restore Flash support: "Modul8 is using the Flash plugin of Safari, so you could load any file that loads in Safari. " Now, that sounds to me like even Java/Processing support could happen via the same hack. Any takers?

Let us know how the update works for you, ye Modul8 users.

CDMotion contributor vade has posted the first release of his v002 Screen Capture tool, which allows video from the screen (including video, 3D — anything output to OpenGL) to be routed between applications. It all happens on the GPU, which means it’s very, very fast. In vade’s words:

v002 Screen Capture allows you to capture your desktop, or a portion of it to a texture and further process it. This can be used to bring in other applications output or windows as a source input to VDMX or other Quartz Composer compatible patch hosts.

Screen Capture is fully GPU accelerated, and therefore is very fast.

Sample Processing, 3L, Modul8, Jitter, GEM, or any application, and mix them in VDMX, or your Quartz Composer patch host of choice.

Right now, the release is Quartz Composer and Mac-only. (Quartz Composer plug-in support means it’ll also drop nicely into software like VDMX.) But there’s an open call to port this to other environments (Pd, Max/MSP/Jitter, Processing, and such). It may even be possible to replicate the basic technique on another operating system, though the implementation would have to be reconsidered.

We’d love some feedback, so have at it! Especially interested in Processing support; see the thread on the Processing forums.

v002 Screen Capture Quartz Composer plug-in download

New QuickTime releases are usually accompanied by a rash of bug reports — not necessarily exclusively the fault of Apple’s; maybe it simply reflects the widespread use of the QuickTime APIs and the general fragility of digital video. We’ve heard surprisingly little, though, from the visual community about QuickTime 7.5.

Macfixit does report some major issues with audio performance:

“The problems brought about by QuickTime 7.5 have proven so dire — an issue with choppy or stuttering playback is most common — for some users that downgrading to a prior version of the multimedia architecture has become an attractive option. Fortunately, downgrading to QuickTime 7.4 is a relatively easy process and is proving successful at resolving many previously document. “

QuickTime 7.5 (#4): downgrading to an older version; No sound — fix; more [MacFixIt]

Sounds delightful … to which a chorus of VJs respond, wait, what? You listen to the audio on video clips?

Despite the gloom and doom, in this case it’s unclear whether these problems are largely on PowerPC, how widespread they are, and what other codecs or third-party software may be involved in the issues. So no reason to panic here. What is useful about the MacFixIt article is that it includes a reminder that Pacificist can be used on Mac to downgrade QuickTime. (Windows users can just reinstall.) I think if you’re going to use computers at all, you have to be prepared for a little of this sort of dirty work — and, naturally, not touching anything leading up to a gig. As an aside, I caught a lot of flak for pointing out audio issues on OS X Leopard recently on Create Digital Music. That case was very different, though, in that we had isolated the source of the issue, it was relatively widespread, and caused reproducible problems with hardware and software from a variety of variables, many of whom reported the issues through their support channels. The bottom line for me, though, is that none of us wants to be the person with a problem, whether we’re alone or not — and sometimes collecting anecdotal experience is the only way to find out what’s up.

Let’s get the anecdotal feedback going:

So far, I’m having good luck on both Mac and Windows (XP and Vista). If you gig regularly and have developed a healthy and understandable fear of updating too early, you may have steered clear of this so far, but we’d love to hear from you. How is QT 7.5 working for you? Be sure to be specific about OS version, apps you’re using, the exact circumstances of any problems, and whether you’re on an Intel or PowerPC processor on the MAc side.

CDMotion contributor vade sends word of some experiments he’s been doing with inter-application video sharing. The basic idea: start with live imagery in one place (like a Processing sketch, for instance), and feed those visuals into another app for adding effects, mixing, and output (like VDMX). Naturally, you’d want to do this without a performance tax.

vade’s solution – Mac-only – uses live visual capture to send the output of one tool to another, all on the GPU. Performance looks great, but the big problem is that the window has to stay in the front. Still, I can already imagine uses for this.

Source-ry [abstrakt.vade.info]

That’s just one approach, though. Could we eventually even have a full-blown inter-application visual routing solution, one that might work between apps, platforms, or computers? I can imagine a few approaches that might work, though performance is always the challenge.

Simple shapes with effective use of 3D mapping to a scaffold covered with semi-opaque scrims.

From French crew Exyzt, who also have released a minimalist Mac video instrument: Cowboy Bitmap.

via VJ.TV