It seems that it’s the season for subscription web offerings. Last week Peter documented the launch and premium packages offered by SoundCloud. Now CDMo’s favourite web video service Vimeo has just introduced a for-pay tier to their service: Vimeo Plus.

For US$60/year you get a 2GB/week upload quota, HD embedding, priority uploading, more player customization, HD embeds and so on.

Introducing Vimeo Plus! from Vimeo Staff on Vimeo.

All this comes at a cost, to regular users that is: Non-plus accounts will now only be able to create 1 Group, 1 Channel and 3 Albums, and they’ll only be able to upload a single HD video each week. These kind of limitations are probably familiar to Flickr Pro users.

The CDM Vimeo account doesn’t currently get quite enough uploads to justify this upgrade, but I don’t think it would be surprising to see us go there eventually. Personally, I’m undecided, but I wouldn’t be paying up right now. That doesn’t matter though, because Plus is currently only available to people in the USA.

So, US-ian Vimeo users: Are you going to get that little blue badge next to your username?

Miguex (who you may know from the CDMo comment stream.) has interviewed Suryummy, creator of the fantastic Interstellar Sugar (previously on CDMo).

Interstellar Sugar - Suryummy from Suryummy on Vimeo.

[ How would you describe you ideal gig? ]
Short and sweet. One thing that I’ve learned over the years, nothing can kill your artistic vibe more then 8 hours of continuous retinal mixing overload. That being said I enjoy the unexpected.

One of my favorite mixing experiences ever, took place in a tiny club in Shibuya Tokyo during a Lightrhythm Visuals tour. I had no idea what type of music I would be mixing too, was totally unprepared and had just managed to get unlost from the Tokyo jungle. The band turned out to be the most fierce live jazz group on the planet. I had never felt so thrilled and challenged as a live visualist.

[ Where do you think video performance is heading? ]
Hopefully to higher levels of quality and meaning. Obviously technology will be as important as ever in defining the landscape of live visuals. The high end tools that are available today such as VDMX, Processing and Resolume 3 will hopefully give artists the freedom to focus more on the art form rather then the technical hurdles that have plagued the movement for such a long time.

More tips from production to performance in the full interview at Accent Feed.
Suryummy’s Site.

The open coding tool Processing has many, many libraries. Some deserve special mention. So I’m going to shift into infomercial mode for a second. Imagine video images of knives cutting through concrete blocks, etc.

Tried searching used book tables for math books because you can’t work out how to do vector math for illustration and the last math you remember is (barely) how to add?

Clueless about whether or not your sphere is intersecting your spline?

Wishing you could export an OBJ file?

Wait! Don’t waste valuable CPU cycles on sine and cosine calculations when your Processing sketch could run much faster with a lookup table! Don’t manually calculate pixels to mm conversions or wave generators!

Karsten Schmidt’s toxiclibs does all this — and more! It’s not just one library — it’s a whole bunch of libraries, each sharpened to slice right through one specific task.

Act now, and you also get tastier-than-ever particle physics using verlet integrators. (No clue what that means? You don’t read this site enough! It’s like other particle systems, only more awesomeish.)

It slices! It dices! It sorts color palettes! It spells color colour!

How much would you pay for this kind of useful library? $100? $200? $500? What, do you think this is Flash? (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) It’s free — free as in beer and as in speech. In fact, someone go buy toxi a beer.

Ahem.

Okay, I promise never to do that again. If none of that made any sense, go pick up Processing. And try those lookup tables — they really are a good thing. If you were a CPU, you wouldn’t want to keep calculating sine and cosine functions, either.

http://code.google.com/p/toxiclibs/

Side note: of interest to CDMotion readers, you’ll notice that JMF video support library is not there. That’s no loss — no fault of toxi’s, Java’s JMF library from Sun has long been abandonware and falls squarely in the “scream and run the other direction” category. I hope to revisit the issue of how to make video work right with Processing over the coming weeks. And having talked to folks at Sun, I am optimistic that, after years of waiting, video on Java is finally getting back on track. I’ll be talking more about that soon.

It’s a beach.

“Content-aware” image resizing — the ability to stretch images without distortion — is all the rage. vade covered the technology at last summer’s SIGGRAPH, and we’ve since seen publicly-available tools. But the New York Times musters an entire feature story on the topic (now it’s definitely mainstream), complete with a monster round-up of tools.

Thanks to Emmet for the tip!

Live visualists are evolving a new toolkit of gadgets for eyeball-friendly expression. Translation: we want the candy that lets us make eye candy.

You may have seen our terrifyingly-large holiday guide on Create Digital Music. This list is a little more, how shall we say, restrained, albeit with some even more important big-ticker items — think HD video cameras. I’m so late with this that "holidays" might be inaccurate … well, there’s still Christmas, Boxing Day, New Year’s, and Orthodox Christmas, anyway. But as a guide to the stuff we perpetually desire in our Crumpler bags (other than more Crumpler bags), here goes:

Anton Marini (vade)

"Well, if you don’t have one, THE indy camera to get this year is still the Canon HV20. I just picked one up for myself, and it’s awesome. You could also go all out and get a 35mm lens adaptor or make one yourself!"

Canon HV20 at Amazon.com

(we’ve got some HV20 stories and how-to’s coming soon — more if I pick one up, as well! -PK)

Dan Winckler

• A Gorillapod flexible tripod [Ed.: the perfect visual stocking stuffer -- dig the new model.]
• A Pelican rolling hard case (above)

Bohus Blahut

Bohus is the co-star blogger over at Retro Thing; while James Grahame sends us goodies for Create Digital Music, we’re pleased to welcome Bohus to the site, and have some terrific stories lined up from him.

FLIP flash-based video camera: great for impromptu documenting, and reminds us that video is still fun. [Ed.: Watch for the review from Bohus, coming soon.]

DVD Recorder: authoring in a computer is better, but I find myself using a cheapie DVD recorder all the time in my work for quick dubs, capturing live performances, recording source footage off of TV.

Victorinox SwissMemory 2 GB USB flash memory + knife: not “visualist” per se, but a knife with a USB drive on it? What’s not to like? [Ed.: At 2 GB, I'd say that qualifies as visualist gear! Maybe not for toting video -- or much of it, anyway -- but if that's not a must-have, what is? Just remember to take it out of your carry-on on the plane, cough, Jaymis. -PK]

Gerber tool: superior to the overrated Leatherman multi-tool (try opening one of those with one hand while hanging from a gantry) Ed.: Leatherman makes my NON wish list. Heck, just give it to airport security. Get something better.

Digital Juice: stock media company offer much more than just animated backgrounds for wedding guys. Lots of stuff that can be remixed creatively, and their recent price cuts make this stuff incredible.

Calibar: pen-sized test signal & sync generator. Not made anymore, and used to cost several hundred bucks. There is something new — the Calibug — that’s similar in purpose that uses your laptop as a signal generator. Very cheap in comparison, but I still like my standalone Calibar. Awesome for troubleshooting.

Ed.: Okay, so the discontinued Calibar isn’t quite available as a gift, necessarily, unless you have a Fairy Godmother. But what about the Calibug? It requires a laptop, and lacks the lovely vintage-ness of the Calibar, but also worth adding to  — well, my wish list, at least. Watch for a review, but it looks terrific: tons of test signal options, a cute, neoprene-coated aluminum jacket, and everything you need is in the package:

Calibug, laptop-ready test signal generator (evidently Windows only unless I’m missing something, so Mac users, go find that Calibar!)

Uncle Milton Lightcast: analog audio to flashy LED party light thingy. Made by the Uncle Milton ant farm people. Got one for review for Retro Thing, but not quite retro enough. Nice for impromptu music visualization though. [Ed.: Yup, expect a review of this, too!]

Atari Video Music: not cheap, but the prices have come way down on Ebay. This device is pre- Atari 2600, before Atari knew the hit they’d have on their hands with video games. It’s designed as a stereo component and outputs crunchy and blocky pulsating graphics in time to music you feed into it. Very nice. I’ve got two. ;)

Peter Kirn

With all this other wonderfulness, and so many potential toys and goodies to own (and, um, store), I’ve decided to pick just one thing I really want. That’s the Chumby. Come on, as an obsessive-compulsive, interactive art-making visualist, you can’t just have an alarm clock. The Chumby is an intelligent, networked device that lets you stream Flickr photos, check the weather (since lovers of projection are often in dark rooms with no windows), and, yes, even run custom Flash visualizations and tools you code yourself. An alarm clock you can code yourself: now that’s a thing of beauty. Okay, technically, it’s not an alarm clock, it’s a "personal internet player", but if there’s another thing visualists need, it’s some technological assistance next to bed things. Late nights at the club, late nights coding, late nights rendering, all-night red eye flights — this application alone surely justifies the cost.

And with built in sensors, you could code the thing to double as a weird, small football-shaped performance controller.

I’m not sure this will get to anyone by Christmas, but you could draw them a picture (or print out some ActionScript) and wrap that. And my birthday doesn’t actually fall until January 13. Just sayin’.

Data Is Nature brings to our attention the Valsuka Archive, an incredible trove of early video art history, exhibitions, work, designs and circuit diagrams. Paul describes it better than I:

The Vasulka Archive is massive repository of documents from the pioneering days of electronic, computer and video art. Containing a staggering 27000 pages of scanned documents, replete with hand typed texts, circuit diagrams and skuzzy ink marks, I could spend the rest of the week perusing this stuff, believe me. The big names are here, Crutchfield, Conrad, Paik, Van der Beek, Youngblood etc - hand written correspondences to the Vasulka’s as well as reviews and even obituaries of each artist/scientist - but history is selective and remembers according to its own algorithm. Encouragingly, not only do we find artifacts from the so called key movers of the time but also an exhaustive list of lesser, and relatively unknown practitioners waiting to be (re)discovered.

Check out the The Vasulka Archive and see what has inspired every generation of video artist. From TV to film to Music Video and club style VJing, it all started with these pioneers.

Via Data is Nature.

Adobe Labs keeps pumping out wonderfulness on a weekly basis. The latest treat is called kuler, an online color theme app. You’ve seen plenty of these before if you do any Web work, but this is different. First, the interface is absolutely gorgeous and intuitive; even if you’re as color-clueless as I am, you’ll love exploring different color themes. Second, it’s built entirely in Flash, making it far more dynamic. Third, and most importantly, you can share the color themes you create. Navigate by popularity, rating, or tag, then open a color theme and edit it yourself, or publish your own. When you’ve found one you like, you can export to Adobe CS2 apps (or just make a note of the color values, of course).

Check it out. Flash 9 is required (and if you don’t have it yet, it’s time — it’s out of beta).

kuler [Adobe Labs]

I’m always looking for color inspiration for my visuals and designs, so I’ll be back.