Stuff that happened in June 2012
I really should start writing short blog posts. These monthly posts takes forever to finish.
Anyhow, here we go – this is what happened in and around our network last month:
From our members
The Volt festival was held once again in the beginning of June. The only two VJ acts representing from the union this year were Joel Dittrich and The Vidiots. 2012 was said to be the year to bring in new VJ talent (it has been pretty much the same acts the last three years) but due to budget cuts they were unable to hire more VJs. A few of the bands had supporting VJs however. Unfortunately we don’t have any video of the VJ performances from this festival yet.
Raquel Meyers shared a sneak peak of her screen printed PETSCII series. They will be for sale soon-ish.
Joel Dittrich will be holding a summer course in motion graphics at Forsbergs school of design (in Swedish).
KubKub performed with Djuna Barnes on June 16th.
Festivals / call for artists
There will be a third edition of Bit to Beat in Barcelona. Bit to Beat are also trying out a new crowdsourcing model on Projeggtit. In contrast to Kickstarter you will keep the funds even if the goal isn’t met. If you have €5-15 (ore more?) to spare, consider contributing to this festival. Or why not apply as a performer?
Or friends in Poland sent out another call for artists.
Tech updates
I released the new version of the Swedish VJ Union web site. You can read more about that here.
Some of us were pretty excited over the new Macbook Pro that was released the beginning of June. The most exciting feature is the double Thunderbolt ports which means that in combination with the HDMI port, the machine can output to three displays at the same time in full HD. That pretty much means that it has a built in TripleHead2Go but with higher resolution. The only thing disliked with this unit was that some parts inside are glued instead of screwed which makes service harder and a nightmare for diy:ers.
The Midi Thief (yes, that’s me again) released a new Modul8 module that can automagically import media added to a specified folder. It’s called Watch Folder Loader and is available in Modul8’s on-line library. You can read more about the features on my blog.
Grigori from the Australian VJ Union made us aware of the release of Splash, the real time audio reactive synth built in Unity 3D. There’s an alpha version available for Windows and a Mac version will be built in the future.
Sigmasix has released the TestCard App for OSX Lion. It’s available in the App Store for $2.99. A future version will feature test cards that you can brand.
Neuromixer published a getting started video for AVmixer Lite 1.5.
Resolume released version 4.1 with native Syphon support (Mac) and a few other interesting new features.
CoGe updates as usual. And they have also updated their BPM plugin.
Millumin showed some new interesting updates. The release is planned for August 24th and the license will cost 600€ and will be valid for two computers. There will be a discount at the launch and there are future plans for a student discount as well as a rental model.
I’m one of the people who have questioned the high price tag and argued that it will be off putting for artists (like myself) who has many softwares in their toolboxe and might not be able to fork out 600€ for one software that will just become another addition to that box. But if the target group is theaters and other companies that can afford it then maybe Phillipe is doing it right. I was hoping for volume over price. But Phillipe is set on the price and I hope everything goes well. I know how much time he has spent on this software and he needs to get some money back. Millumin truly has a lot of good features collected in one single program.
You can follow the discussion regarding the pricing here. And read more about the latest updates on Phillipe’s blog.
Iannix now has Syphon support. Iannix is an open source graphical sequencer that uses the OSC protocol. You can see for yourself what it can do.
Canon2Syphon is another handy app that will take the live video signal from a Canon DSLR camera and send it over Syphon. You will get a fully clear image without display overlays. It’s not full HD since it has to be transferred over USB but it’s near, you will get something like 1056×704 pixels.
A preview of the Arduino controlled Blackmagick ATEM mixer.
Tech rumor: If I understood Bangnoise’s tweet right (unconfirmed) he seems to have made it possible to use Syphon between two Macs over ethernet. If this is true I am looking very much forward to seeing this in a future release.
