When Adobe acquired Macromedia, a lot of people thought that’d be the end of Director. After all, Director and Flash have had increasingly overlapping capabilities for some time, and Director seemed like something people used years ago. Think again: talk to people doing interactive design, and Director — for better or worse — lives on.

With the Director 11 update announced this week, that’s unlikely to change any time soon. New in this release:

• Vista support on Windows, Intel support on Mac
• Bitmap filters (a la the bitmap API in Flash 8/9, I’m assuming)
• Full JavaScript support and Code Snippets
• Enhanced Flash support with CS3 and Flash Video support
• Built-in physics via AGEIA PhysX
• Native DirectX 9 3D support

Now, anyone for a Voyager interactive CD-ROM (as pictured right, from the Director heyday)?

Physics and 3D? Impressive stuff. So I should be excited, right?

We’ve been eagerly awaiting the perfect video scratching solution. The Ms. Pinky hardware is fantastic, but the software is long in the tooth, so for anyone not wanting to create their own Max/MSP/Jitter software, it may not be the best choice. Serato, while they’ve lagged seriously in basic features (only recently adding MIDI control, for crying out loud), nonetheless excel at rock-solid vinyl control. Vinyl-controlled digital DJing? Yawn. Vinyl-controlled digital VJing? Now that’s more interesting.

After a long wait, VIDEO-SL, Serato’s video plug-in for its Scratch LIVE software, is here. (Serato Scratch LIVE 1.8 is required; it’s an add-on. Updated: I erroneously said this was part of Scratch LIVE 1.9; not sure where I thought that up, but it’s 1.8!) It’s in beta for download now, with a full release shipping January 2008. (Yes, Serato, we’re clearing our NAMM schedule to talk to you about it.)

Here are the specs from Serato:

• Add video clips to your Scratch LIVE performance
• View loaded clips and output from your computer
• Manipulate playback with control records or CD’s
• Mix Audio and Video with the Rane TTM 57SL mixer
• Use built in transitions and effects

The "built-in transitions and effects", "bonus music videos and loops", and "mixer overlay" are a bit worrying — well, at least we can ignore the last two, but please, Serato, we’re hoping you’ve done some decent effects that don’t shout Cheez-Whiz. (Not that I don’t like spraying artificial cheese product onto food. I am American. Just not in my VJ sets.)

As for system requirements, the good news is this runs on Mac, Windows XP, and Vista, provided you’ve got a recent 2GHz+ processor. (I assume they mean that for simultaneous audio and video.)

The bad news: you need a Rane TTM 57SL mixer. So I’d say this fits into the "niche" category as far as audience. I’m sticking to computers; I can’t even lift turntables. But let’s say I know at least one VJ who could do some beautiful damage with this (and we’ve got one lined up for a CDMo review).

About VIDEO-SL [Serato]

We hope to have that full-blown review soon; stay tuned.

Previously:

New Serato Scratch Live 1.8 Will Scratch Video

Actually, let’s just roll the video again. Mmmm… embedded video. Nope. Still want hands-on time.

Pd, aka Pure Data, is the free and open-source cousin of Max/MSP/Jitter. It’s powerful — even sometimes having technical advantages over Max — but has suffered from complex installation and dependencies, poor documentation, and an unpolished interface. Enter Pd-extended, a distribution that fills in those gaps. Pd-extended’s maintainer Hans-Christoph writes up what this is all about in an introduction on Create Digital Music, friendly even if you’re new to the Pd world.

Pd, Max’s Free Cousin, Gets Polish and Ease in Extended Build

Visualists should be especially interested in this latest release, because it offers much-improved out-of-the-box support for custom-patched 3D and video — especially if you’re on a Mac, for the PiDiP (though there are Windows and Linux improvements, too, and GEM works even with Windows).

Mac OS improvements:

• Image and video-processing PDP/PiDiP work out-of-box
• Anti-aliasing of boxes and lines in the interface
• New, purty icon

Linux:

• A .deb package for Debian and Ubuntu, with GNOME menu support. (`Bout time! Wonder if this means we’ll see it in the big Ubuntu repositories?)
• New icon

All platforms:

• GEM, the quasi-Jitter-like 3D and pixel library, has working shader support. Ed.: Truly outrageous.
• New libraries: mapping, msd, mrpeach net/OSC, flib
• [comport] is robust on all platforms (can you say Arduino?)
• Font-face and -font-weight command line options
• New font and layout is the exact same size on all platforms to the pixel. (previously you’d see some serious cross-platform glitching)

Pd Extended Release

And lest you have a bad taste in your mouth from the fugly older releases of Pd, Anton (vade) sends along the picture at the top of this story, showing the new UI from the Pd 0.40 dailies running on Mac OS X. Anton is also working on porting some of his brilliant visual patching from Max to Pd — and he’s living proof that even a Max die-hard can find at least some use with Pd, too. (The two environments are really, really close — sometimes confusion switching between them is because they’re so close, the differences can be confusing.)

For no particular reason, we’ve gone super-Mac/Apple-centric here on CDMotion this week, so to even the score, I’m curious: what Windows-only tools do you choose for your visualist needs? The awesome DirectX-based free modular environment vvvv immediately springs to mind, along with our VJ app fave Resolume. Windows also happens to be a great gaming platform, which has interesting implications for visualists — anyone building custom 3D visuals in Microsoft’s XNA framework, for instance? I also like DirectX for video input at the moment.

But what else do you depend on, whether big apps or little tiny utilities?

(Hey, at the very least, Mac users, you’ll have a reason to boot Boot Camp, now Leopard-only.)

Via comments, Eelke (whose system is shown above) alerts us that previous video output problems running Windows in Boot Camp appear to be solved in Leopard — at least using the MacBook Pro. (Phew — get all that?)

See the ongoing thread on VJforums. Eelke says:

My configuration:
- MacBookPro 2,16, 2GB ram, with ATI X1600
- Upgraded to Leopard (OS X 10.5)
- Used the same Leopard DVD to update all drivers in bootcamp / XP
- Rebooted with DVI>s video dongle plugged-in, s-video out attached to small reference monitor

After the initial booting XP logo which we had all the time, I suddely saw my desktop cloned on the small screen. All I had to do is go to desktop>preferences to extend windows to the secondary monitor, and it worked.
After that I used ATI Catalyst control center to set the screen (now recognized as a TV!) to run in overscan, no problem at all, even during live rendering (with visualjockey).

Houray! Houray!

A sad side-note however is that regular macbooks with Intel videochips and mini-dvi adapters still don’t seem to work properly under XP. Maybe under Vista, who knows?

Okay, anyone tested MacBooks (non-Pro) on Leopard? Is there a way to make this work?

Certainly, booting the Mac side for Quartz Composer, Final Cut, Motion, VDMX, then switching to Windows for Resolume, vvvv, games, etc. has some serious appeal as a visualist dream setup. (Overkill? Sure. But a lot better than juggling machines or being forced into the OS by the hardware.)

3D goodness means getting cozy with your local graphics API — and getting ready to nerd out in a big way. OpenGL continues to progress with a major overhaul. It’s a way off, but you’ve still got lots of eye candy with OpenGL 2.1. So … if you’re not Electronic Arts or Bungie, is there really any reason to use DirectX?

With the release of Windows Vista, we’ve been hearing a lot about DirectX, Microsoft’s Windows-only API for accessing graphics hardware. Of course, most of what you’ve been hearing is Windows gaming lovers complaining because they have to upgrade to Vista just to get DirectX 10 — and they take a compatibility and performance hit for many existing games as a result. (The latter isn’t DirectX 10’s fault; it’s a side effect of a new driver and display model in Vista itself, which impacts OpenGL and DX9, as well.) So what’s going on in the OpenGL camp? At SIGGRAPH, OpenGL 3 was announced. The full spec isn’t available yet, and actual OpenGL 3 hardware will be some ways off, but the future looks bright. In a presentation on the new OpenGL, NVIDIA’s Michael Gold pointed to these major hallmarks:

• Getting “back to the bare metal” for performance. This includes cutting back on overhead, streamlining the API, and actually revamping the object model in a way that should boost raw speed.
• Simpler, more efficient application development.
• Simpler driver development.

So that all sounds good. The object model appears to be the major change, with new object meta-classes that make it easier and more efficient to, well, make stuff. Good luck deciphering this at this point (I expect it’ll be easier once the real spec is out), but here’s more on the announcement, with slides:

OpenGL 3.0 Birds of a Feather at SIGGRAPH
PDF with slides, via NVIDIA’s Michael Gold

Us visualists, of course, can leave most of this to developers and hardware makers. What’s nice is that when we do want to make things look slick, we have access to a cross-platform 3D API in tools like Processing/Java, Pure Data (via GEM, etc.), and Max/MSP/Jitter.

As it happens, I’ve been looking at both OpenGL and DirectX solutions while putting together tools and frameworks to do new 3D work.

Jaymis is getting ready to go on tour with a rockstar, and I’m dreaming of geeky OpenGL implementations for 3D eye candy. Don’t worry; we’ll make the two worlds fit together eventually.

Here’s the latest from OpenGL land. First, perhaps the days of Java lagging in OpenGL implementation are done. The updated 1.1.0 JOGL bindings support OpenGL 2.1 and NVIDIA GeForce 8800 extensions, for groovy geometry shaders and other good stuff. Let’s see, that puts Java’s OpenGL bindings well ahead of OpenGL 2.1 implementation on Mac OS X, which isn’t due until the fall. (Just a binding, but still.) And you should be able to experiment with OpenGL 2.1 and the NVIDIA extensions from within Processing.

And Vista? OpenGL runs just fine on Vista, according to the Khronos OpenGL ARB Working Group. (Hey, aren’t they the ones cloning the President’s nose? Sorry, Woody Allen reference.) It’s compatible. It benefits from Vista, somehow. And it’s competitive with XP. Of course, all of this is in theory; in practice, drivers from NVIDIA in particular seem … not so fresh, performance and stability wise, at least in my experience. I expect this situation may improve over coming months.

Enough geekiness. Simple translation: Java for OpenGL rocks! OpenGL will run well on Vista on all drivers someday.

Surprise! The one application with which I’ve had the most success on my Vista turns out to be Max/MSP/Jitter, the niche, Mac-first multimedia application built by a small handful of developers. Without so much as a single update, Jitter is running perfectly on Vista, running on an NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600 card on an Alienware m5550. (Next stop: upgrading my home-built Shuttle XPC SFF machine.)

The good news about this, especially in light of the generally mixed results in gaming, is that Jitter is a deeply OpenGL-dependent application. And for Windows users who have tired of glitches and stutters when showing OpenGL in a window on XP, you’ll love Vista. Thanks to GPU-bound graphics, windows animate smoothly, as on OS X. All I do notice is a slight delay when switching to full-screen, but these not-yet-released NVIDIA mobile drivers have been exhibiting little glitches each time the UAC (User Account Control) dialog appears. Otherwise, I’ve had good experience with this, and tellingly switching back from full-screen mode to pointless GPU eye candy like Flip 3D doesn’t cause a single problem. Vista could wind up being a great OS for running your home-built Max patches after all.

One major caveat that should keep Jitter users from rushing to upgrade, though: PACE copy protection isn’t officially supported yet, meaning you may have issues authorizing your copy of Max on Vista. I expect an update will come soon based on what I’ve heard from Cycling ‘74 and PACE. So, stay tuned; I’ll be sure to post more detailed Jitter results and information on the update once it becomes available.

Anyone else using Vista aside from me? More reports? I’m too scared to try Processing + Java; different Processing versions combined with different Java runtimes have been enough of a moving target as-is.

Vista for visualists is a problematic proposition. Typically, musicians have the toughest upgrade curve with any OS, but there’s a major incentive for musicians with Vista, as reported on CDM: the promise of significantly improved audio performance and stability. Right now, there isn’t enough software or hardware support for most musicians, though I expect that picture will start to change even within the next few weeks.

For visualists, though, we have two problems:

1. The only really major improvement (beyond what’s in Vista itself) is the new 3D platform, DirectX 10. That could be huge for advanced visualists willing to be platform-specific — but with the development tools only just now available and a lot of Microsoft’s own development initiatives (like XNA) still tied to DirectX 9, even programmers are unlikely to do anything with DX10 in the near future, let alone end users. (Cheap cards will be out soon, but more on that in a separate story.

2. So far, the big hole in Vista is graphics support. So, not only is the step forward (DX10) not quite ready for most users, in the meantime OpenGL and even DirectX 9 will see a big step backward for the short term.