This brief video, uploaded to YouTube by Fairlight co-founder and designer Peter Vogel himself, gives a brief history of the development of Fairlight’s legendary video hardware, the CVI. The CVI was a theoretical (in name, at least) visual counterpart to the ground-breaking CMI digital sampler instrument. And, like the CMI, the CVI had a major impact on artists and produced some of the best digital creation of the 80s — and some of its most-repeated cliches.

Vintage Fairlight Computer Music Instrument Videos [Retro Thing; see also Create Digital Music]

But here’s an important difference: has the evolution of visual hardware and software really equaled what’s happened since the CMI on the sound side? Music hardware and software has evolved and exploded since the CMI. The only real visual hardware today available to consumers that’s not a mixer is Roland’s CG-8, and it’s arguably narrower in scope than the CVI, despite being two decades newer. Even in software, the idea of a visual instrument you can play is still evolving. Now, I suppose you could argue visualists have more to play with — powerful 3D capabilities, for one — but perhaps that’s why visual gear has been slow to catch up.

What do you think? Is there a visual - musical cap in digital tech? Or am I trying to compare two things that really can’t be compared, whether Australian designers gave them parallel acronyms or not?

artificialeyes are keeping us updated on the impending release of 3L (current status: Soon), and while I’m still in “getting my studio in order” mode in the lead-up to the “2008 massive VJ geek-out and CDMoFest” and unable to play with new toys, CyberPatrolUnit has posted some great demo videos (and followup), showing us some of the places that 3L may be able to take us.

3L and Lemur at LAX from CyberPatrolUnit on Vimeo.

Exciting? Maybe a little. I still have lots of 3L video to edit from Perth last year, and I’ve promised Michael that I’ll have some videos ready for the official launch. Stay tuned!

Despite the many gigs I’ve played in my time as a VJ - including over 80 in the last year of touring - I am yet to record my output on a single live show. It sounds terrible, but I know I’m not alone in this: Both musicians and visual performers I’ve worked with tend to focus on creating the show itself, rather than documenting the output. Musicians have a plethora of hardware available for recording audio, and the visual market is starting to get some wider options.

High-end video hardware creators Blackmagic (previously on CDMo) have released the “Video Recorder” (not sure if I’m keen on that product name), a $200 USB device which will “record” analogue “video” (ok, turns out I’m fine with it) in H264 format straight to your hard drive.

The base model lets you choose from Component, S-Video or Composite, and for $100 more you can get the SDI version; for all of those production houses which inexplicably don’t have any devices which allow capturing of video to computers.

Currently only Mac software is mentioned on the Blackmagic site, but that does look quite friendly, with simple buttons to select the source and output formats, and an interface for cropping out analogue weirdness from the stream.

There are other devices which fulfill similar roles, such as the aforementioned Pinnacle Video Transfer (available now), or “multimedia” hard drive enclosures from dubiously-able manufacturers, but something which isn’t much bigger than a thumb drive and coming from a company known for their high-quality video devices could just succeed. (via Gizmodo)

We asked earlier this month if you’d be using Flickr for videos? Here’s one answer — and in this case, it seems perfectly-suited to the medium. Accent Creative used a short video spot — tweaked to Flickr’s microformat length constraints — as a way of promoting an upcoming event. That works nicely, as lots of people already use Flickr streams to store photos promoting events and the like.

And, of course, the Create Digital Music side of our heart loves the sound-making box that shows up in there.

Brokenbeat Night - MoGraph Promo

Here’s another example, in this case using a short video as a kind of micro-showreel:

Via the CDMo Flickr Pool - thanks to everyone for all the eye candy you’ve been sending! Why blog when I can just watch the lovely stuff you’re doing?

This really illustrates what could start to happen with media on the Web: rather than littering everything everywhere, and rather than seemingly-redundant sites interfering with one another (Flickr for video?, asked users), we get content tailored for the venue. In fact, vids like this really don’t necessarily belong on Vimeo — and likewise, I’ve come up with short snapshot videos I wouldn’t want as part of my video pool.

Promising stuff. And as video proliferates, the visualist and motion graphics artist become king. Get ready.

One of the things I’ve really grown to appreciate over recent months is the rich communities on Flickr and Vimeo — Flickr for stills, Vimeo for videos. Each of those, incidentally, has very active groups around free visual tools vvvv (for Windows) and Processing (for everything). Unlike "big bucket" sites like YouTube, Vimeo in particular has had some really terrific niche crowds of people.

Of course, now Flickr has gone and added video. I don’t see this becoming anyone’s primary video uploading site, given a more restricted feature set, the mixture of videos and photos, and the 90-second length cap. But as a supplement to, say, Vimeo, it’s interesting — especially given the number of times I’ve wound up in someone’s photoset staring at a still image and wondering what the thing looks like in motion.

Personally, I could easily see doing long-form or "feature" videos on Vimeo and adding photos to Flickr where it makes sense in my photostream — it’s all about context for me, rather than dumping lots of random stuff everywhere.

How do you feel about Flickr video? Are you using it? Are you staying away from it? Any first impressions? Videos you’ve got I’m you’d like to share with the CDMotion community?

Don’t forget the CDMotion Flickr Group; we’ll be watching for videos there.

At top: one the first people in my contact list to use Flickr Video is interactive artist ("slash" many other things) Jaki Levy, who is doing HD video for Ralph Lauren’s flagship store here in New York — see his blog.

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!

Bjork lays on the spectacle in a new music video for “Wanderlust,” and the results are quite gorgeous, even in advance of a promised 3D version. If you had the misfortune of trying to watch it in Yahoo’s world-premiere, horribly-overcompressed video early this week, give it another go. (I’m glad I waited to post this rather than have to show that! Yikes!)

As of press time, Motionographer has a high-quality QuickTime file so you can watch this in all its glory.

The results are a real multimedia extravaganza. The painterly wonderland in the surrounding world is clever digital graphics and computer 3D, though made to look organic, while foreground beasties, costumes, and prosthetics are all real-for-real. Here’s the timelapse of it all coming together:

The cast of thousands includes:

• Directors Encyclopedia Pictura (Isaiah Saxon and Sean Hellfritsch), who got the music vid world buzzing earlier with their video “Knife” for Grizzly Bear; see further commentary from blog Shots Ring Out
• NYC motion graphics firm UVPHACTORY, seen before working on My Chemical Romance’s “I Don’t Love You.”
• Damijan Saccio led the CG team from UVPHACTORY. I don’t know who he is, not that that means much. Damijan, say hi if you’re out there…
• John Weissberger and Vanessa Waring did the puppetry; Circus Minimus member Jessica Scott was lead pupeteer
• Chris Elam, whom I do happen to know personally, was choreographer

… to say nothing of the stereography work which we’ll be seeing soon.

Now, the odds of any of us ascending to Bjork-like budgets tend on the slim side, but I do like the convergence of the pro digital motion scene with the artsy puppetry - making physical stuff crowd. I know at least a couple of the people on the dance/puppetry side of this project, and I also know making that convergence work is a tremendous challenge, artistically and technically. The challenge remains making it come together in lower-budget projects and with the often more-challenging realm of live performance.

How to get free 3D specs for the 3D version [bjork.com]

Making of video timelapse on Facebook

We’ve seen visual vinyl, via the video stylings of Serato’s VIDEO-SL plug-in. But here’s a more literal approach: stick the camera on the turntable. Via a multi-camera setup, Cut Chemist and DJ Shadow are doing that with their honest-to-goodness, scratching turntablist sets. I especially like the camera up close on the turntable itself — something instrumentalists might try, too. (Well, maybe you want to stop somewhere … no endoscopies during your performance, please, unless you’re an avant-garde performance artist or something.)

More on this sort of thing soon, but there’s something to get the thought process going. Thanks, Jaymis!

The Edirol V-4 has been the standard mixer for years, leaving people desperately wanting a sequel. Korg tried with the KrossFour, but what they came up with was mainly a V-4 wannabe — a welcome DJ-style crossfader couldn’t make up for the lack of differentiating features, and the V-4’s elegant layout. And Edirol’s own HD-resolution V-440HD wasn’t priced for mortals.

The Edirol V-8 promises to change all of that.

First, Edirol has wisely copied the satisfying control layout of the V-4. Hate on the V-4 if you like, but I think we take for granted how cleanly-designed and intuitive that layout is. The V-4 isn’t a perfect mixer by any means, but by encouraging mixing flow, and creating an affordable mixer that worked well for a broad audience, they did create a major hit.

What’s great is that the V-8 adds what the V-4 lacked:

• Computer inputs: two “RGB” inputs with standard D-Sub 15-pin inputs (what most people call VGA jacks, even if that’s not strictly correct); a switcher for selection
• More inputs all around: 7 composite ins, 4 S-Video jacks, for a total of 8 simultaneous input channels (i.e., you can use up to 4x composite and 4x S-Video simultaneously)  … oh, yeah, and BNC jacks
• More outputs: 3 output channels, and monitors for inputs 1-7, channel B (monitoring either S-Video or RGB computer in), and the main preview output jack
• Independent, DJ-style vertical faders instead of those inconvenient V-4 knobs, plus better preset buttons — and an output fader, not a knob (finally!)
• Internal scan converter and time base correction