Toby Harris a.k.a. Toby *spark did a presentation of his first manufacturable prototype at the Visual Berlin festival. He just finished editing a video from the presentations that contains a few revelations:

1. The unit will have a fade curve control so that you can mix from a flat blend to a flat add.
2. It will be ethernet enabled so that you can use several d-fuser mixers in master / slave mode. It also makes it possible to write a OSC library for the unit.
3. It has a screen and a menu.
4. The unit’s software is open source and will be available on line as soon as the mixer is released. This makes it possible to add more functionality to the mixer.

There are still a few things to do before the mixer goes in to production so there is still no release date yet, but “soon” toby says. Regarding the pricing it seems like he is still on track, to quote Toby: “£750/$1000 is very much the plan. If you budget for that, I think we will be in a good place, you might even get a surprise”. So the pig is out of the sack, now lets anxiously wait and tap our fingers…

Link to Toby’s original post. Video by Pedro, photo by Andreas Apelqvist.

I was chatting with Andreas Apelqvist from Starstladd who just came back from the Mapping Festival in Geneva. We had heard rumors previous to the festival about a new VJ geared Midi controller from Codanova that was supposed to have controls similar to the first iPod. This funny teaser movie premiered during the Mapping festival and was uploaded to Vimeo earlier today. Andreas says he heard further rumors that Codanova are planing to release the controller in a month, “but they’re French, so I don’t trust ‘em”, Andreas added. I’ve contacted Codanova about this and they say that they will release it in September. No word on pricing yet.

It looks like it’s somewhere between a touch interface like the Lemur or iPad and a traditional controller with regular buttons, knobs and faders. The only similar product I can think of is Stanton’s SCS 3 system. The layout of the VMX Activ8 is made specifically for the Modul8 VJ software but I’m pretty sure that it will work with most VJ programs. I’m not sure if this controller is as tactile as I want it to be, but hey it’s beer proof god damn it and I’ll probably buy it, or as Andreas said, “you’d buy anything with a midi logo on it”.

Andreas will write about their Mapping Festival adventures within the next few days, stay tuned!

Engadget just wrote about this new projector from Norwegian company Projectiondesign which is a new take on video projectors. They are separating the lens from the lamp and the fan connecting the two units with a liquid light guide. Read all about it at Engadget!

Futuremusic writes that Denon has just announced DN-X1600, a digital DJ mixer with built in USB sound card, 4 MIDI layers and Roland’s V-link. The V-Link enables you to control some of Roland’s video equipment like the effects of the V-4 and V-8 mixer, linking them to the tempo of the music. Futuremusic claims that the V-link is the hottest feature of Denon’s new mixer. Any VJ who has played around with the effects on the V-4 and the V-8 knows how cheesy they are. So if this is the hottest feature of Denon’s new mixer – I’d say it’s not so hot. If you link poo to the tempo, it will just become rhythmic poo.

Instant Broadcasting System is a software solution for receiving and mixing several video streams from cellphone cameras and broadcasting it live on a screen and/or to the internet. It’s an academic research project from Mobile Life in Stockholm under the lead of Ph.D student Arvid Engström. This project has been going on for about two years and I’ve been helping out on and off during these two years. The software has gone through a few name changes during the project. I’ve written about it here before under the names WeJ and Swarmcam.

The solution has two components – a Symbian application that is running on a Nokia N60 cellphone and a Max/MSP mixer application that is running on Mac Pro. During this demo we’ve been using 3 cellphones but the system can for sure do 8, probably up to 15. Each input takes a lot of CPU to process so you need a powerful computer to do it. The program has been tested on a MacBook Pro but it hits the ceiling pretty fast. And another problem with having many inputs is that it’s hard to overview all the preview windows. The cellphones streams the video over wifi or 3G to the computer. The resolution of the video is 320×240 at a top frame rate of 15fps. This isn’t very exciting but with Turbo 3G already here (in Sweden at least) and 4G at the doorstep we can expect much better image quality. Some new phones have a better codec for video compression which also gives better video quality. The software on the phones will be able to run on other Symbian enabled phones as well as the Androids. The iPhone has had it’s video functionality under lock, but since the recent release of the Bambuser app it seems like it would be possible to cover the iPhone too.

The interface has gone over a huge overhaul and finally got some design to it. A quick run trough:

In the left column you have a preview window and output settings as well as audio settings, you can broadcast audio from one phone a the time.

The middle column is the home of the A and the B unit as well as the preview windows for each camera. You can see four preview windows but we were only using tree for this demo. Below are the image settings for the A and the B bus as well as a the “Backchannel” which is a system for communicating with each camera person. The A unit of the mixer hosts the cellphone camera streams. You switch stream with the number keys or by clicking the preview windows. The B side hosts the more artistic side; pre made clips from the video bank and loops (recorded from the live streams). You can crossfade between the A & B as well as mix them through blend modes.

The right column has the video bank on top and the loop module underneath. You can feature either the loop module or the video bank as well as mix them together with blend modes. A nice thing with the loop module is that it has a recording buffer. This means that when you hit rec, it actually starts the recording back in time making sure you don’t miss the action. The in and the out point of the loop can be adjusted and you can save the loops for later use.

The interface could be controlled by a midi controller. We have had the Novation Nocturn mapped for this demo.

So would I use this software for VJ-ing? No, not at the moment. It sure is an interesting technology but over wifi and 3G, the image quality just isn’t quite there yet. I am however very curious to see if Arvid will add more VJ features like beat matching and on-the-fly midi mapping.