During the high-definition wars, your feelings about new higher-capacity storage discs may have ranged from ambivalence to dread to simple disinterest. (Well, that’s how I felt, anyway.) But with Blu-ray triumphant comes this realization: "hey, brain, we’ve suddenly got increasingly-affordable ways of burning high-capacity media!" Drive upgrades on the PC side cost what DVD burners once did, and if you’re hooked up to a TV, the writer can be your player, too. (There’s already a Lite-On internal drive for around US$350, and I expect these prices will plummet as production ramps up.)

That’s burning, anyway — authoring is obviously essential.

Bart from Resolume has posted some details of the release of FreeFrame 1.5, including OpenGL-based FreeFrameGL:

FreeFrame 1.5 Release

Here’s why it makes us smiling, happy visualists:

• Open and wide: It’s open, and supported by multiple hosts (the creators of VJamm, Resolume, and Salvation all contributed to the 1.5 team)
• GPU, go! It gives you GPU-powered goodness, meaning more flexibility, power, and speed for 2D and 3D effects alike
• More pixels, more frames: It runs at higher resolutions and frame rates
• Third Dimension: It supports 3D functions and pixel shaders for joyous new eye candy
• Timing: A timing function allows time-dependent visual effects like particle systems and physical simulations (tasty!)
• Developer-friendly: Sample projects (Microsoft Visual Studio, Delphi, Xcode) and source should help get coders up and running — and the coders then turn out goodness for you non-coders
• User-friendly: If you don’t want to code, you can expect lots more awesome plug-ins for your VJ app of choice.

Join us in CDM Labs: If you’re interested in joining a special CDMotion team working on additional documentation and sample projects, give me a holler. Otherwise, stay tuned.

Pictured: one of the Resolume team’s plug-ins in development.

Anyone up for doing the Death Star?

Those of you not on the mailing list for Resolume missed a double bombshell coming this weekend at Paris’ Vision’r VJ festival.

Big story #1: open visual plug-in standard gets hardware savvy. the official release of FreeFrameGL 1.5 will happen, hosted by Resolume’s Edwin and Bart and VJamm’s Russel. FreeFrame is already a big deal; it’s an open plug-in format for visual effects, a bit like VST for visuals, except open-source instead of chained to, ahem, Steinberg. (Music folks know why that’s annoying.) With OpenGL support in FF 1.5, FreeFrame plug-ins get hardware-accelerated visuals.

Big story #2: a new Resolume will be revealed soon. This weekend we finally get to see what’s in the future for Resolume, the cult favorite VJ app on Windows. It’s a preview, but it’s good news, and it’s a year and a half in the making according to Resolume’s makers.

I was trying to explain to someone why Resolume is still important. "But it looks toy-like, like the rest of them," they said. "But there’s all this stuff hidden, this quick access to basic techniques," I said. I do believe that. Of course, I may be even happier with what Resolume 3 brings.

Hey, happiness is mixing visuals with a Mac in one hand and a PC in the other…

We hope to have more details on Resolume 3 and FreeFrameGL 1.5 for you soon.

Anyone in Paris at Vision’r? Take photos, take video, write some quick thoughts — we’d love to hear from you!

Gavin Morris has been working on an audiovisual setup with Ableton Live and Isadora, a tasty combination for any Windows or Mac user. Isadora, for those of you who don’t know, is a visually-focused modular patching tool. It’s similar to tools like Max/MSP/Jitter, but by emphasizing the practical needs of visual performance, it’s unusually usable when putting together real-world gigs. Its use by A/V dance troupe Troika Ranch (co-founder Mark Coniglio is also the tool’s creator) has also popularized it in modern dance circles.

Gavin has two tutorials for us to start. The first syncs up Live and Isadora, along the lines we ran here using Live by momo the monster:

AV Cutup Secrets: Using Lucifer & Live

Gavin writes:

It’s similar to Momo’s recent Tutorial but uses a free tool for the VST (Pluggo) and allows control from the Live interface (as opposed to within the VST) This allows you a lot more flexibility and means you can use Follow Actions, adjust loop lengths/positions in realtime and even create a slicer. It is Live>Isadora via OSC but could equally be to many other softwares and could equally use MIDI.

I’ve written a VST to go in slicer channels tool.

Sync Ableton Live to Isadora using a Pluggo VST from digital funfair on Vimeo.

Gavin warns us that the video may "put us off." At first I thought that meant it was NSFW or something, but … well, that’s not the problem. You’ll see. I leave it up to you to decide how you feel about it.

The second tutorial gives you the power of Emergency Broadcast Network-style A/V slicing:

I’ve done a tutorial for a Video Slicer - synching up Live’s slicer to Isadora - same technique but a bit of maths to convert the midi notes Live creates to video position. You can make some quite glitchy s***!

AV Slicer Tutorial - Ableton 7 Slicer with Isadora from digital funfair on Vimeo.

Lots more information at Gavin’s site, Boredbrands Digital Funfair.

He needs someone to build the Mac plug-in, so Max users, if you’re game, go for it!

AV Sync Tutorial

AV Slicer Tutorial

Good as this is, I hope we see some audiovisual setups that work with more asynchronous relationships between music and motion — I know my own tastes for my personal work tend in the abstract. Maybe I’ll have to put my money where my mouth is and write it up myself.

Aforementioned visual synthsizer slash exercise tool WiiWhorld has been released for public consumption.

Jeff Mission has tied together GlovePIE (for Bluetooth/Wiimote input (previously on CDMo)), Whorld, and his own secret sauce (a GlovePIE script to control Whorld).

Put them all together with a dash of virtual midi port, and you get this:

Or as Jeff describes it:

Whorld is a free, open-source, live visual synthesizer for sacred geometry. It uses math to create a seamless animation of mesmerizing psychedelic images. You can VJ with it, make unique digital artwork with it, or sit back and watch it like a screensaver. The WiiWhorld project makes it possible to control the Whorld visualizer with the Nintendo Wiimote.

WiiWhorld.

It’s still early in development (read: it often crashes), but The Bean Machine applies nodal, patch-based development to Java. The interface is mysteriously close to Quartz Composer, down to capabilities, UI, and even the 3D cube tutorial. Personally, I use Java because it can do things Quartz Composer can’t, but it’s interesting nonetheless — and raises, again, the question of why we don’t see more tools that try to meld the capabilities of code and patches.

The cool bit: nodes are Java Beans, so you really could use this to combine the best of both worlds if it matures. No download yet, but we’ll be watching … perhaps it will inspire other developers, as well.

The project is labeled “experimental”, but could be worth a look. Developer Jerry Huxtable has lots of other goodies for Java-heads on his page, including lots of 2D image processing stuff and a map editor — Processing lovers, might want to pop this into your del.icio.us.

Bean Machine @ JH Labs

JH Labs main page with lots o’ projects

Guitar Hero? We want VJ Hero. And the AV Arcade Table, now part of the Boredbrands Digital Funfair, is exactly what you’d want it to be like.

It’s got the hardware — a DIY, cocktail-style arcade table, just the like the one you spent playing Ms. Pac-Man on, slightly drunk.

It’s got the software — a Windows PC running VJAMM.

And it’s got the content — Guitar Hero and Rock Band have rock classics, so this has some classic clips from VJs.

Official description:

The AV Arcade Table is a simple hybrid, a table top arcade cabinet that has been converted to run Vjamm, the best Audio Visual VJ Software by miles! Using the joystick and buttons 2 people can trigger audio visual samples and create beautiful collaborative audio visual collage/ a chaotic mess** (delete as appropriate!).

The Table was originally created for Cybersonica 2007 and was featured as part of “Soundwaves” at Kinetica Museum

Thanks to Eclectic Method, Exceeda, Hexstatic and Vjamm All Stars for supplying content.

AV Arcade Table @ Boredbrands Digital Funfair

Incidentally, reasons to give some props to VJAMM, even in this overcrowded world of VJ apps, and even though everyone went out and bought MacBook Pros last week, it seems:

• Coldcut uses VJAMM. I mean, celebrity matters little to us here, but they do use it well, and that counts.
• The Novation SL line of keyboards supports Automap in VJAMM. (It’s England, so I’m guessing that idea got worked out over a pint — which is certainly the way I like to make deals.)
• They have this cheery slogan on their website: “VJamm3 is the world’s leading audiovisual instrument, the ultimate tool for sound and image mixing, the true 21st century artform, the new hip-hop.”
• This table

Thanks to Gav for the tip — great work, mate! And to all readers of CDM: go for the shameless plugs. There’s no shame in it. We love to see the cool stuff you’re doing.

Jeff Mission writes to say he’s been working on a new project that couples the Wii remote with generative visuals — all built in free software. Like it, but think it could go further? It’s free, so have a go (soon, at least). Jeff writes:

Chris Korda, developer of the open-source VJ softwares Whorld and FFRend, and I have been working on a project to control real-time, generative geometric visuals with the ever-popular Nintendo Wiimote. We dubbed the project WiiWhorld.

I am pleased to announce that the first proper WiiWhorld demo video is now available online:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=bw1bHVPHk_g

Swirly colors, techno, dancing, and lots of smiling faces! Anyway, I think it does a decent job of capturing people having fun playing with our little digital toy.

The video was cobbled together from about 90 minutes of party footage shot a couple months ago. We set up our rig and invited people to play around, with a minimum of instruction. It was great fun to watch people play around, figure it out, and then teach new techniques to one another.

As for the project itself, it requires a Wiimote and a bluetooth-enabled computer. All the software involved (GlovePIE, Whorld, and FFRend) is 100% free, making this (we hope) a project that others can adopt and expand in the future, at minimal cost. We hope to publish more detailed information soon, so that others can try WiiWhorld for themselves.

Please give it a look, leave comments and ratings, and pass it on!

The project is apparently brand new — and Jeff says more web content and videos and documentation and such are all coming soon.

And yes, GlovePIE, Whorld, and FFRend are all free and open-source Windows apps. (And you thought Linux had all the fun.) beatfix (aka Jeff) suggested them and got our Windows free apps round-up going:

VisualJockey Goes Freeware; Free Windows and Cross-Platform VJ - Visualist Round-Up

Anyone who wants to get us rolling on a similar Mac or Linux list, drop us a line.

It’s no secret: the once wildly-popular ArKaos VJ software has been looking a bit long in the tooth lately. And upgrades only get you so far: sometimes, as software matures in its life cycle, you have to redo the foundations. That’s what ArKaos has been working on, and the results, renamed GrandVJ, are due out soon (quarter 2). The new version emphasizes a re-worked, cleaner interface, multi-threaded graphics, and lots of effects and generators.

ArKaos GrandVJ Announcement

It’s up against some stiff competition. There’s the ground-up rewrite VDMX5, with some powerful semi-modular capabilities, the beefed-up Livid Union 2.5, Modul8, Resolume, and new generative app 3L. (See why 2008 will be a big year for VJ software.) That said, of these, only Union is cross-platform.

One differentiating feature in GrandVJ, as partly inherited from ArKaos VJ before it, is its “synthesis mode.” This maps sources onto a virtual music keyboard; combined with effects and generators that could retain ArKaos’ place as an easy, instrument-like visual tool.

The generative idea is nice, as well, but even with Flash support, I wonder how ArKaos will hold up to other generative competition. 3L has powerful tools for building 3D graphics in the software, Processing is gaining support among coders, Quartz Composer has native support in software like VDMX for custom patches, and Salvation has its own generative tricks, to say nothing of Jitter, Flash/Flex, and vvvv. On the other hand, ease of use can make a big difference in the market, and ArKaos’ interface is uncommonly clean. And then there are the ArKaos loyalists, who could find a compelling, friendly upgrade. (If you buy ArKaos now or bought it after March 1, the upgrade is free.)

We’ll have more details when this ships.

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?