I’m sure that after all of our gentle prompting, people are keeping a watchful RSS reader over Flight404.

For those who haven’t been paying attention: The latest iteration in Robert’s wonderfully evolving Magnetosphere series was designed for the AniBoom Radiohead video contest:

Weird Fishes: Arpeggi from flight404 on Vimeo.

More information.

LUX from Richard Lainhart on Vimeo.

Our friend Richard Lainhart sends this lovely "swirly thing" (to use technical terms). His description:

An abstract HD film animated in After Effects. The soundtrack, "The Beautiful Blue Sky", is a realtime electronic synthesizer improvisation for Buchla 200e and Haken Continuum.

My description:

Mmmm…

Oh, sorry. Forgot what I was saying: staring into swirly thing. Hey, it’s the weekend. Enjoy!

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!

video mlr clone demo from themoves on Vimeo.

I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of using the Monome, the popular open-source, button-bestrewn controller device, for visuals and not just sound. But I haven’t seen any examples in person. Via comments on Monday’s Live + Isadora story, here’s one example by Joshua Nugent. The software is inspired by MLR, the sound sample-rocking patch that comes with Monome. In fact, that’s one area in which I think the Monome hasn’t gotten enough credit — a lot of its popularity actually comes from its software design, not just its elegantly-minimal hardware design.

I tend to do visuals differently, so I’ll have to finish my kit, finally, and post some software examples. And yes, while this is done in Isadora, there’s nothing saying you couldn’t use other software tools.

Bonus points for including Bush dancing in Africa. Now someone send poor Josh a screen and some windowblinds.

More on this project on the Monome forums, including instructions:

how about a video version of MLR/64step?

I’d love to see more Monome examples, so if you’ve got them, send them in!

The Light Surgeons are an eminent, inspiring AV UK collective whose latest work, New Adventures in Folklore, fuses documentary filmmaking, live music and visuals in an “eye-popping performance of epic proportions”. They kept a blog and posted many gorgeous photos and video excerpts (see embedded slideshow and video below). See their main site for more inspiring videos from their works Thumbnail Express and In Passing. More photos in their Flickr.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Blindsider Video:

Music produced and arranged by Scanone
CGI Animation by BlinkinLab

Featuring: Emskee, Dezmatic , Atypical, Nobs

If you’ve been intrigued by all this talk of Quartz Composer, the free visual creation software that ships with Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5, here’s your chance to actually learn how to do cool stuff with it. Our friend Momo walks us through a basic tutorial on simple 3D and audio processing, which you could easily apply to more complex ideas. With QC support in the upcoming VDMX5, you could drop this into a VJ set with traditional clips, as well. We’ve got step-by-step instructions, plus a video. Let us know if you create anything wild with this as its basis.

Quartz Composer: Lighting 3D Cubes and Moving them with Audio Input from momo_the_monster on Vimeo.

In this Quartz Composer tutorial, We’re going to make a 3D cube that responds to our voice.

First we start up Quartz Composer. The icon will be different depending on whether you’re running OS X 10.5 or 10.4.

From the File menu, choose New Blank (or simply ‘New’ in Tiger).

Via Wiley Wiggins’ blog, I’ve learned that Doc Baily passed away in April. Doc is perhaps best known for the breathtaking visuals he created to represent the sentient planet in Steven Soderbergh’s film Solaris, which were generated at extremely high resolution–for film, remember–in Spore, the software he wrote. I was very moved by Solaris and inspired by the cinematography and the visuals to push my own nascent work. Watch some video of Doc’s work, especially this clip from Xtacism by Doc Baily and John Buchanan, 2005, and many more. Here are some screenshots of Doc’s work I particularly like, which link on to the galleries on imagesavant.com. Read Doc’s words and those of his colleagues on friends on the Center for Visual Music’s memorial page.

For participatory art in a similar vein, I highly recommend Spot Draves’ Electric Sheep, which is (much more than) a beautiful, abstract screensaver.

I was about to post about Daniel Shiffman’s new MPE (Most Pixels Ever) Library, when what should appear in my Processing Blogs subscription, but an extended video showing more of the ITP lab, and The Shiff (first ever rockstar processing nickname? I hope so) himself talking about the project.

Preface: If you love Processing - as we do here at CDMo - then you should already be subscribed to ProcessingBlogs, and have probably already seen this. However it’s too cool not to add to our Processing.org tag page. Hence this post.

“Most Pixels Ever” (not to be confused with “Best Pixels Ever”) is an open source Java framework for spanning real-time graphics applets/applications across multiple screens. The above video is a quick demonstration of the first prototype. Three client applications on three Mac Pros connect to six 32 inch LCD displays (each Mac has a dual video card, but this could just have easily work with 6 client machines). One of the Macs is also running a server application. The server tells each client about the master pixel dimensions of all the screens combined (here 8160×768). The client keeps track of its own location dimensions (say 2720×768) as well as its location with in master dimensions (say 5040,0). The server keeps everyone in line, making sure that frames are rendered in sync.

We’ve had a couple of people in the CDM Forums asking about multi-screen projections and video installations. It’s a logical progression for advanced projects - there aren’t many things which won’t look considerably more awesome if spread over multiple screens - but hasn’t really been an option thus far in Processing, unless you were to go the hardware multiple-monitor route.

To the video: Tech Trek: Inside ITP (episode 2) (3 minutes).
Via ProcessingBlogs.

HD4Indies’ Mike points out the Canon HV20 “Compact HDV Camcorder”. It’s has an HD (1920×1080p) CMOS sensor, records HDV to DV tapes, and sports an HDMI out for uncompressed capture.

Mike likes the look of it for a “learner camera”, to me this looks like an ideal unit for tethered shooting of visuals, studio shoots and time lapse requiring frame rates faster than an SLR can deliver. I’m starting to spec out a tour rig at the moment, this looks ideal for throwing in a backpack - I’ll let the film crews lug around the big heavy cameras.