• Vidvox has redesigned their website and premiers their “Starving Artist Discount”. Do a bit of work for Vidvox and you’ll get $150 off.
• Vade and Bangnoise announces VVFFGL, an open source Cocoa framework for FFGL 1.5 plugins, commissioned by Vidvox.
• The Syphon team (Vade and Bangnoise) announces Syphon for Max 6 updated to r2, now with Jitter implicit context support, & bug fixes.
• CoGe has a 1.2.1 update with better font handling, text files and bug fixes.
• Millumin adds layer warping and Audio routing.

Some of the plug-ins from Automatic Duck is now free. One of the cofounders, Wes Plate, has left the company to join Adobe and bring the functionality into Premiere. The Pro Importer AE 5.0 allows you to export your sequence as a XML from either Avid or Final Cut Pro, and then very easily import them into your After Effects project. I’ve been drooling over this plug-in for a couple of years, but never felt that I had the $500 that it used to cost. So hurry and download them!

http://www.autoduckinc.com/

The image below shows an example of my sequence in Final Cut Pro, exported and then imported into After Effects.

CoGe v 1.0 (OSX) has been released and is no longer free. The creator made the decision to go commercial to be able to keep the project going. The software costs only $99 and is right on sale for $79 which is good bang for the buck.

The software has been reworked an now features arbitrary layers, effects, the mixer chain, native Syphon support and even a beat detector. CoGe supports Quicktime, Quartz Composer comps, Flash files and Collada 3D meshes and Core Image effects which makes it pretty damn powerful software. Go to the CoGe site to download the demo and purchase the program.

Garagecube has announced a bunch of minor updates and releases: Modul8 2.8.3, a new printed manual for Modul8, an on-line Modul8 module manual, Mad Mapper 1.0.3 and MadLabs, a series of small apps for MadMapper.

http://www.modul8.us/?p=812
http://www.modul8.ch/documentation/modules_manual/
http://www.madmapper.com/2011/08/08/mad_lab-and-more/

My first reaction: The MadLabs apps seems like a fun playful addition. I noticed that MadMapper’s slightly awkward masking tool didn’t get updated and there is still no (official) Syphon input in Modul8.


You might have heard about Marco Tempest before. He calls himself a technology magician and he is working with a big bunch of different digital media, techniques and new gizmos.

Here’s an interview with him if you like to know more about his ideas and passion for magic, illusion and technology.

I like his high-speed camera projects and he has done many nice videos under the category “two seconds”. I would really like to start doing visuals with this kind of high-speed cameras but the problem is that they are complicated to operate and on top of all very expensive to rent and especially to own.

But here’s where things gets exciting:

“Marco is working with Swiss maker AOS Technologies to develop a low-cost high-speed camera that could spread the use of this kind of photography. Marco has already been doing some beautiful work with the prototype model” – Peter Krin, Create Digital Motion.

I have contacted AOS Technologies to get more information about it but have not yet received an answer.

While waiting for more information there are some pictures on Marco’s Flickr and the “two second”-videos at his Vimeo account that are recorded with this prototype camera.

I will come back to you when I have more information.

/Dan Nordgren, Startsladd

Through the Syphon project’s Twitter I got aware of an interesting software called eMotion that just has been Syphon enabled. This means that you can bring in contents from other VJ software or send eMotions content to a Syphon enabled VJ program. eMotions declaration really spoke to me:

“eMotion is a tool for creating interactive motions of objects for live visual performances. Electronic motion seems often artificial, synthetic… well… in fact it does not convey any emotions. By defining new rules to create movements, eMotion is a new kind of software made for visual live animations.
As it is based on real world physics law, all motions seems natural, full of emphasis. It allows to manipulate different kind of objects like still image, videos, text, drawing. Targeted mainly for theatre/dance performances, it can be used in broader situations.”

As I’m interested in working more with dancers and interactivity this seems like the perfect tool. I did a quick test by bringing in eMotions output into Modul8 (using the QC Rehab trick) which worked perfectly. Bringing in Syphon content into eMotion from VDMX seemed to work fine. I’m ready to explore this software more and also investigate if it’s easy to bring this into video mapping projects.

The software is free (donation is encouraged if you decide to use it) and it’s still in Beta at the moment. Download eMotions at Macupdate.

Novation has just announced the Twitch controller that has been developed together with Serato. It’s a hybrid of a conventional DJ controller and controllers made for softwares like Ableton Live. It has also been inspired by the Monome and the controller hacking communities. It’s not in the stores yet so we will have to wait and see what people really thinks of it. The price tag is expected to be $599. Personally I think this could be an interesting controller for audiovisual DJs. Even for audiovisualists that uses Live but there are already so many controllers out there and I’m not sure this one will top them. The compactness of this controller really speaks to me and that it has an onboard sound card.

This was spotted on the Futuremusic blog and there is a nice longer piece about the history of this controller on CDM.

The Syphon Recorder beta was released earlier this week. This is a new app in the Syphon family for OSX and it does exactly what it sounds like: it records video from any Syphon abled application and it also records sound from your source of choice.

So applications like VDMX that never had a recording function can now use Syphon Recorder to record the material straight to disk. I was doing tests using Soundflower to route music from Soundcloud playing in my browser into VDMX and recorded the whole session with Syphon Recorder without any hitches. And as an avid Modul8 user I’ve always been missing the option of recording sound with my visuals. In the next version of Modul8 that has Syphon support I will be able to use Syphon Recorder to record visuals and sound to disk.

But hold up… wait a minute. If you have ever used the Record to Disk function in Modul8, or just recorded any VJ session to disk in any VJ program , you know that it’s never a good idea to record to disk while reading video during a performance, it usually ends up with a lot of dropped frames and sad faces. So how are the Syphon guys handling this? I asked one of the creators, Tom “Bangnoise” Butterworth, how they handled this issue:

“We’ve worked hard to minimise the amount of work involved in recording, so you can get smooth video with the lowest possible impact on the rest of your system. Where possible, we use a custom shader to convert frames to 2vuy on the GPU, which halves the amount of data we have to move around and saves an expensive conversion stage during compression. We combine that with deferred-download of the data from the GPU and some careful threading and buffering to minimize the number of frames dropped due to system activity elsewhere.

During video playback you get constant spikes of disk activity while chunks of video are read – so if the disk is busy we accumulate frames until it’s ready to write again. Usually there is enough RAM available to easily handle this. We only drop frames if the data-rate of the compressed video is higher than your disk can keep up with – or if you are doing something involving heavy disk activity, such as performing a Time Machine backup or file-sharing, but hopefully you’re not doing either of those during performance.”

I just assume that faster processor, plenty of RAM, VRAM and fast disks like SSD would help this matter. Which of these things are most important, if any?

“Recording Apple Intermediate Codec onto an SSD, I can get ~60 FPS 1080 HD, but that’s with a fast processor and graphics card and with as little as possible else going on.

For the best performance, record to Apple Intermediate Codec, because it has a good balance of quality versus data-rate, and is fast to encode. For a lot of things you can get away with limiting the frame-rate to 30 FPS. A fast disk makes a big difference, especially for HD video. Never use a codec with alpha-channel support (Animation or “None”) if you don’t need the alpha-channel, as they slow every stage of recording down drastically.”

Edit: Syphon Recorder Beta 3 has been released. It restores audio recording on OSX 10.6.7 and adds support for ProRes codecs, etc.

Download the Syphon Recorder beta here.

We did a similar experiment when the Swedish VJ Union gathered for our January Tech Show & Tell session. It wasn’t as advanced and beautiful as this experiment and we had no naked volunteers. It’s important to have the Kinect shooting straight at the object or it will get tricky matching up the video image. This experiment called Bodyscapes by AfterMe is using Isadora together with the Kinect. Via vj_emtv.

The first version of iMixHD by VJ Fader and VJ Leo has just been released. This software controls the TvOne 1t-c2-750 dvi mixer that we have been raving so much here on the blog. We were lucky to try the beta which had pretty limited functionality and now the guys have added some more controls.

When you launch the program you get the setup screen. The only two things you need to select in the serial port (you will need a USB to RS232 serial adapter to connect to the TvOne unit) and the Midi device. When you uncheck the Setup button you will get to the main screen.

The first thing I notice is that they have turned the order of the midi mapping right (touch the controller in the software first, then the controller on the midi device). In the upper right corner there’s an option to lock the buttons on the TvOne unit’s front panel. That saves you from trouble if you tend to or if you are just a bit clumsy. The second set of buttons are for selecting the inputs for the two channels. RGB1 and RBB2 are the video sources and TC1 and TC2 are images that you can store on the TvOne unit (you will need the Corio Tools software that runs on Windows to transfer images to the machine). Underneath you have the faders and cut buttons or channel A and B. I had a bit of difficulty to map the cut buttons to my Korg Nano Kontrol but if you use the Korg Kontrol Editor software you can change the buttons you want to use for cutting Control Change to Note. I am not super keen on the user interface of iMixHD but I know it’s a bit tricky making good conventional UIs in Processing.

It works great fading one channel at the time but if you start sliding both faders they tend to stutter or one will get stuck. There is a known problem with sending too much data to the TVOne unit at the same time.

I know that there are a few more thing that you can control but that hasn’t made it in to this version of iMixHD like luma keying and setting of the resolution so that you don’t have to bother with using the buttons on the TvOne unit and it’s lousy on screen display.

iMixHD is available for Mac and PC and is also available as Processing source code. You can download them all here:

Info: www.neuromixer.com/imixhd
Download: code.google.com/p/imixhd/downloads/list

Previous posts written about the dvi-mixer.