VDMX5 may be “perpetually in beta”, but oh, what a beta it is. The latest version includes some major breakthroughs, a new render engine, lots of new features — and significant signs that VDMX may be nearing its milestone non-beta release. And don’t bother mentioning the “beta” status to the many people for whom this insanely rich, Mac-only VJ app is the center of live visual sets. VDMX has been rock solid, and keeps getting better.

VDMX5 public beta 6.9.0 now available [Vidvox User Forums]

New in this release:

• Faster rendering: A new render engine with vastly improved performance - and OpenGL add/over blend modes (”extremely fast,” say Vidvox)
• Smarter sizing: Smart auto-sizing and syncing size
• Stills: Better still image / texture support
• Interactive Web sources: Live use of Flash files and even Web pages (evidently including applets like Processing), with basic interaction
• Slicker effects: Layer-specific effects preset chains, new delay and RGB delay FX (I always enjoy a little RGB delay), and better effects management

More documentation and improvements are coming, as well.

The render engine is clearly the worthy headline here, but I think people will be very, very excited about including Flash and Processing sketches. I have to give that a try. (CDMotion’s own vade hacked his own solution, routing visuals between apps on Leopard — but, of course, better integration would be great.)

It’s also worth noting that this yet again demonstrates that “native” visual support isn’t always better — that is, OpenGL in this case trumped the Mac-only Core Image for blending modes. Obviously, you use whatever works best, and that is at least in some cases the cross-platform API.

As VDMX plows forward, it’s not alone. Just to mention one rival, previous preview.) Resolume is now on Twitter if you want to stalk — erm, follow — the creators.

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.

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

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.

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!

Our friend Sean Healy, aka Jean Poole, has a great interview with visualist *spark (Toby Harris of London). We love *spark for many reasons — for founding AVit, for being a wildly-talented artist, for reintroducing the idea of narrative to visualism, for VJing live on a giant touchscreen (see below), and other goodness, not necessarily in that order. Toby talks to Sean about everything from his philosophy of performance to some of the technical possibilities of audiovisual performance today.

I particularly like what *spark has to say about live cinema, and why the tools are “hotting up”:

That term ‘Live Cinema’ is something close to my heart though: I reckon you can specifically and deliberately combine a lot of whats good in established cinema and clubbing to give a completely new way of expressing yourself as a VJ-esque performer while engaging with audiences’s own creative thoughts. The key to it is an improvisational use of narrative, rather than forcing a fixed story down their throats, you could be a cinematic incarnation of the oral storytellers of old, weaving tales on the fly, or providing the scenarios and juxtapositions that people find themselves compulsively mapping their own narratives onto. Stepping back from that, I’m interested in anything that uses media to make people interact or think in unexpected ways, which has taken me from playing with the conventions of one-man theatre to storytelling installations. And the tools are really hotting up at the moment, things are getting interesting.

*sparkin’ it up [Skynoise.net]

Speaking of hotting it up, check out that potent combination of Ableton Live (for music) and VDMX (for visuals) on a MacBook Pro. It’s a coupling we’re seeing more of these days. (And it doesn’t necessarily have to be Live and VDMX per se, or even one laptop — but people exploring real audiovisual soundtrack means Live Cinema can be sonic as well as visual.) Those of you working on similar setups, we’d love to see them. Whether it goes on Create Digital Music or Create Digital Motion — well, I can flip a coin.

Lighting designers rely on DMX in a similar way that electronic musicians use MIDI; it’s the glue which binds their performance together. Many older (as in age, not experience) VJs I meet have come to live video performance through a profession in lighting. Younger visualists tend to have been attracted to the artform through work or study in film and TV, or a love of electronic music and culture. These people (like myself) may know that DMX exists, but have no real experience with the protocol, or the gear it controls.

So when artificialeyes demoed the VMS system for Peter and I at ByteMeFest in Perth last year, I was struck by how simple this step into the lighting world could be. Todd and Michael were using off-the-shelf VMS projection units and controlling them with a clever little open source USB DMX controller called the uDMX, which includes software to translate midi messages into DMX.

So when it came time to plan for the 2008 album launch tour with Bobby Flynn, my desire to expand the impact of our show (while keeping to an extremely restrictive budget and baggage allowance) put a moving video system right on top of my list of possibilities. In the end we didn’t have the cash to invest in VMS, but taking Peter’s previously tried route of mating an inexpensive Rosco iCue robotic mirror with the projectors we already had in our rig was a simple backup plan. For around AU$1000 each (around $600 in the US), plus a trip to the hardware store, we now have two functional (if currently rather ugly) DMX controllable video moving systems.

2008 is looking like an extraordinary year for visualists: there’s an explosion of new software tools for live visuals. One of the most eagerly-anticipated is 3L (pronounced “Thrill”), a multi-purpose live visual application for Mac, from the massively-talented artificialeyes trio of Pascal Lesport, Michael Parenti and Todd Thille. (Todd, FYI, you may have to change that last name to 3iL.) We’ll be showing and explaining where 3L fits in, but let me jump into my unedited geeky take on it first.

3L is unique in that it takes a lot of the cool generative effects people are doing in individual patches for Max or Processing, loads them into one massively modular interface, and mixes in the prerequisite amount of pixel processing, audio, and MIDI. It’s like the monster Jitter patch you’ll never have time to finish, all on one screen — one very big screen; the software actually requires 1440×900 resolution to operate. If they had just done that, Thrill might fade into the blur of other modular environments created in recent years, but the software has also been packed with features tested by the Artificial Eyes crew in their gigs — meaning a whole lot of what you’d want to be able to do in a club is there already, including countless features you may not have even thought of yet. Pascal also apparently coded his way around limitations in Jitter.

We got an inside peek at the software in Perth. In fact, we peeked at a little too much — so much, we’re still, erm, editing all the footage we shot. And we might have gotten into that editing in Perth were we not out until the wee hours of the morning VJing with Thrill. Jack and Coke, Western Australian nightclub filled with ridiculously young-looking clubgoers, plus a completely unfamiliar interface that looks like the love child of Max/MSP, a 747, and a spaceship? Hell, yeah. With everything wired for MIDI and sound reactivity, Jaymis and I immediately found ourselves zoning into pulsing abstract patterns, even when we weren’t entirely sure what we were doing.

VDMX, the “realtime video studio” from the makers of Grid, semi-modular live visualist tool for Mac, and very possibly the “world’s most mature beta software”, continues to pack goodness into each new beta release. But the most recent addition, just now available as part of the primary public beta release, warms my heart. The latest beta adds support for OpenSoundControl or OSC, a protocol for communicating between computers, hardware, and software. With high-resolution data, an open-ended naming scheme, and network savvy, OSC is just plain better than MIDI at at least some tasks. But it’s suffered from a lack of documentation, a vague specification that’s a bit too open-ended and daunting to developers, and most of all, a lack of critical mass as far as tools. One small step at a time, that’s changing.

So far, the VDMX developers have tested their implementation with the multi-touch Lemur controller and inter-app data with Apple’s free Quartz Composer. But OSC is also supported in Processing, Max/MSP/Jitter, Pure Data, and free controller implementations for the Wii remote and Wacom tablet, among many other things. It’s also supported natively by the Monome controller, which is quite a lot cheaper than a Lemur. Want to pipe data from a Wacom into Quartz Composer? Sync data between a Mac running VDMX and a PC running vvvv? Something … uh … else that I haven’t thought of? Quite a lot is possible.

And an iPhone implementation could come next. (Or you can send OSC from iPhone right now, with MrMr.)

You can try this out in the beta that’s available now, though David Lublin from Vidvox warns us:

…there’s still more to do with OSC, currently no way to trigger files, it’s just control data, but the core functionality for sending and receiving is there, so we really just need to start building on top of that for whatever protocols there are to support

…the OSC support is still very much in it’s early stages.. it is there and stable, but we are barely scratching the surface of what we can do with it

Of course, that description could apply to OSC in general, which is why the two CDM’s (createdigitalmusic and createdigitalmotion) will be working over the course of 2008 to work with users and developers to share knowledge and get better implementations in everyone’s hands sooner. It’s something I hope to check in on while I’m at NAMM next week. Stay tuned.

Vidvox + VDMX5

VDMX5 public beta direct download link (Mac only)

Introduction to OpenSoundControl [opensoundcontrol.org]

Speaking of multi-touch OSC implementations, we hope to catch up with CyberPatrolUnit, who’s working on a VJ interface on Lemur, as pictured below. He’ll be bringing it to the CDM NAMM party, so if you’re in LA, come see us next Friday!

Nice work if you can get it: visualist Toby / tobyz, aka *spark, had one heck of a live visual rig for the Geneva Motor Show’s Ford booth. One ongoing challenge for live VJs is making it clear what they’re doing. Solution: “VJ Crew” t-shirts, lovely women (can’t hurt), and, of course, giant touchscreens for interfacing with the Mac software. Live visuals made the client happy (interactive text!) and made guests happy by snapping photos (happier clients!). The software rig was the glue:

• VDMX5 from Vidvox (still in beta), which looks the ideal interface for the work they were doing. Custom, modular palettes and windows also lend themselves nicely to the touchscreen.
• Quartz Composer patches, built with Apple’s free visual-patching developer tool for custom visuals, integrate directly into VDMX5. Result: a modular, custom system that works live and gets the job done!

Documentation:
Photos and notes on the install/performance
Video montage of the event

Open Source Tool for Easy, Live Titling

But you don’t have to just silently drool over this setup. Toby is nice enough to give away one of the tools he built to make it happen, open sourced so the community can improve upon it.

Spark Titler, GPL-ed Quartz Composer patch for live text titles

Quick titling? No problem. Toby describes it thusly:

the titler’s interface allows you to take between two sets of title/subtitle, with the choice of four backgrounds: black / green / a quicktime movie or a folder of images. the output window will automatically go full-screen on the second monitor if it detects one is available at launch, otherwise it will remain a resizable conventional window.

it is released with the intention that it can be reused for other events without changing a single line of code: you can design the animation and incorporate quicktime movies in the design by editing the ‘GFX’ macro in the quartz composer patch, and its a matter of drag and drop replace the logo in the interface.

And if you’re up for patching some improvements (with a little light Xcode use), you can dig into the source, as well.

Why Live and Interactive Rules

But enough about the technology. Part of the whole philosophy of this site is that we believe “rendered”, wonderful as it can be, sometimes must make room for “live.” Quartz Composer is just one of a generation of tools that allow visualists to move in this direction. It’s part of our interest not just in the “Final Cut” (ahem), but the live cut. Artists are moving in this direction for creative reasons, but it’s equally encouraging to see it working well on gigs. It’s a practical, technical issue as much as it is a philosophical one. Toby explains in a caption to a recent blog entry on his Quartz Composer titling patch (pictured here):

this picture is but a snapshot of the revolution. it really feels like that. a real let-down of the geneva motor show pre-production was the inability to translate the creative agency’s after-effects rendered text animations into the live, dynamic setup. there just was no way to implement anything vaguely sophisticated without seeing the framerate drop to near zero. structure record, something driven by video sampling and seemingly tangental [sic] to text rendering, is the key to solving that problem… and so here it is solved, as if on cue for the frankfurt motor show.

(emphasis mine)

Structure Record looks like some kind of custom patch. Not sure how it works — Toby, if you want to enlighten us, please do!

So have a look at that patch, and viva la revolución!

(Via the Quartz Composer dev list and vade.)