Non real-time processing sketch.

Music is ‘Why Midnight Walked But Didn’t Ring Her Bell’ by Liars.

Cast: Barnaby Sheeran

Processing version 145 released. This release contains several changes to fix issues related to timing
in sketches. The animation loop has been tuned and several bugs have been ironed out. Download here.

continual experiments in slit-scanning. because the journey is more interesting than the destination.

Cast: matt ditton

Neon is among the best of a breed of obscure, indie VJ software gems around the world. The creation of mac/xplsv.com and later shine/xplsv.com, it’s made a mark not only as a VJ performance app but as a creator of real-time motion demos. It can event manipulate 3D Studio Max 7 scenes in real-time. All of this goodness could simply die as the developer moves on, but instead shine has decided to open source the code. That gives this Windows-only software a shot at a port to Mac and/or Linux, and turns it into a playground for would-be visual programmers, even if they just want to dabble in filter creation. And it gives the rest of us a lovely tool to add to our toolbox, free.

The feature set is pretty tasty:

• Layered effects: 10 effects layers (called FX instead of layers, oddly), with various blend modes, and a master effects channel - a really nice, practical architecture
• Real-time 3D with 3DS Max support, pixel shaders, vertex shaders (all apparently on DirectX, so some work would be needed for Linux, Mac, and OpenGL)
• Flexible formats: DirectShow, ffmpeg codec support, image support, SWF, live video capture
• Endless filters: Included filters, custom filters using pixel shaders, and a filter SDK with Virtual C++ examples. FreeFrame support, too, though not FFGL (yet) - Resolume has the win for FFGL support so far
• Live control, beat sync: The “beat manager” is the most insane part of this — and why this might find its way into your toolset. You have elaborate control of how things are synced to the beat, with even DJ-style pitch bend controls and per-element sync of parameters in your project. There’s also FFT (sound-reactive input) control, and MIDI.

Programmers can have at the SVN repository right away. Non-programmers get something special for free. I doubt this will shake your loyalty for your existing performance tool of choice, as a visual creation tool you’ll want to check out some of the cool 3D demos done, like this award-winning xplsv.com video, “Sound Pressure.”

xpslv’s Neon v2
Neon v2 goes open source [soledad penadés]

Thanks, Sole, for the tip!

My sense is, it’s easier than ever to collect an unusual set of software for production before gigs, even if you stick to one tool as your main performance tool. That’s what we’ve done on the music side for years, of course, but it’s nice to see the “studio” concept happening in visuals, too.

It also seems that the VJ scene could use one multi-purpose VJ app that is a benchmark for open source, live visuals. (Pd/GEM has that well covered on the patching side, but an all-in-one VJ app would make a strong complement.) The only issue I see is that this is pretty friendly to Windows developers, less so to everyone else. (Windows developers should have a field day, in fact!)

There really isn’t a killer development environment at the moment. I have been closely watching JavaFX, but that’s a story for another post. This does, though, illustrate the kind of things you want in an open tool — you really need extensive shader and 3D support, and for an open source project, you probably want to ignore DirectX and build on OpenGL for simpler cross-platform support. (You could support both — this project would be an ideal candidate for that — but otherwise, supporting one or the other seems simpler to me.)

I’m working now on a round-up of the best free Windows VJ/visual tools, to be followed up with a bigger list for other platforms; holler if you’ve got some tips.

© Peter Kirn for Create Digital Motion, 2008. |
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Cast: aircord

2nd installation at Siam Centre, 27 July-3 Aug 08
ground view

Cast: Wit Pimkanchanapong

Create a live, visual accompaniment for a sound composition. Each participant will select an audio composition from a provided list and will spend 10 weeks developing and documenting a visual performance. This project focuses on iterative development and the process of creation.

Music : Flexen by Microstoria
Performed: May 2006

Cast: jonobr1

Since weeks I am thinking about writing about this topic that really caught my interest. It’s about videos, that are really cheap in production, mostly even have a “lo-fi” aestetic as well, but nevertheless convince because they have the power of a good ideas, charimas or funky tweaks, that make the difference. The begin of this new series on Digital Tools will make DJ Kawasaki.

The clip “Bright like Light”, well, basically does not show anything more that the singer itself at different places, singing her song. Nothing really special and really a classic in making music videos. Even the locations are nothing special. Mostly walls and things like that. The lack on original content or special places is totally replaced by the charisma of the singer and the natural vibe she spreads.

Just look at the video: production budget? Not very high. But I really liked that clip. You can make a clip like that also at home with standard equipment. And since we are living on a webvideo-age, also very high picture quality is needed not to convince the customer.

Import and export is, of course, a huge workflow factor for anyone, especially anyone from a graphic design background. Some of my students at MassArt have been kicking the tires on Processing’s SVG and PDF libraries and running into hitches. There’s nothing more frustrating than getting an obscure error message when you think you’re doing things right. Happily, we’ve got some solutions.

Of course, it’d be great to hear from others with similar issues.

The following libraries might also be of use:
http://www.texone.org/prosvg/
http://processing.unlekker.net/SimplePostscript/index.html

PDF

Several students had problems with font embedding using the built-in library. Symptoms: strange, blocky letters. The issues seem to occur on Mac OS X (all the students in this case I believe were on Mac exclusively.) The reference documentation for the PDF library offers this clue:

Starting in release 0120, text is no longer treated as shape data by default, meaning that the font will need to be installed to view the PDF that’s created. The upside is that the PDF will render better (particularly in light of the Mac OS X bug noted here). To force text to be treated as shape data, use textMode(SHAPE), immediately after size(). See the developer reference for textMode() inside PGraphicsPDF for more specifics.

But so far, forcing SHAPE hasn’t been very helpful.

Colin Owens has this tip instead:

Placing:

hint(ENABLE_NATIVE_FONTS);

before text();

does the trick.

This needs to happen before all your other font/text code. (I believe setup() is optional.)

I also suggested, for those on the Mac, at least, that people get fonts working on Mac and try re-saving in Preview.app for cross-platform / cross-machine compatibility as needed. (The same would be true with Acrobat or any PDF builder on any platform, just in case the library is misbehaving.)

Oddly, people are still having issues in which the first couple of characters are garbled, so they’ve taken to hiding the first two characters used. Bizarre.

SVG

Mahesh Gudapakkam was having some problems with the SVG graphics format, even following examples from Ben Fry. Nicely enough, he solved it himself.

Basically, the issue was tag information being handled in a way other than he intended, thus triggering an array out of bounds error.

First, the symptoms:

running into a problem here .. i am trying to work with a SVG version of the US map.

i have a version that works well - zooms in and out and scales the way i want to - unfortunately i had no way to control characteristics of individual states (only later did i realize that SVG’s can have markers for individual states stored as attributes to its tags and my svg image didnt have any - i downloaded a free one of the web)

i realized the above while reading through ben fry’s [book Visualizing Data]. in an example of his, he points to an SVG on wikimedia (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Blank_US_Map.svg)

for some reason when i work with this file i get an exception
java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 1

all i am doing at this point is declaring a SVG object and reading this downloaded object into it .. and then trying to display it - any ideas?.. processing version is 0135Beta

The problem? Poorly-formed tags:

quick update. i was able to figure out what was causing the array out of bounds error. comparing the working svg vs the one not working and picking up on some threads from some of the early postings rgd’ing issues with candy’s parsing on the processing forums - i found that the graphic tag had some extra attributes. here’s how it appears in the non-working ones.

OR

the candy svg library seems to not like this - once i reduced it down to it happily worked. also a few other things i had to change -
1. it does not work with the tag either - needed to get rid of it
2. some other tags it failed to work with are ones that had these attributes

# sodipodi:type="arc"
# sodipodi:nodetypes="cc"

processing complained that it does not recognize the shape command - once i got rid of these attributes it didnt complain of those errors ..

once i addressed all of these i was able to get the svg to work with candy.

this might be something of interest to others in the group who might end up working with SVG’s .. these tags get produced even when you use a program like illustrator to create a svg (i went that route too and it produced errors as well). hopefully it will save them some time.

If you run into other errors like this, let us know!

2nd installation at Siam Centre, 27 July-3 Aug 08

Cast: Wit Pimkanchanapong

Playing with processing this week. The code was changed from the great ParticleEmitter (http://www.flight404.com/blog/?p=115)

The input is from microphone. When you blow at microphone, new particles are created. If they have too much velocity/size, they can explode in smaller particles.

Sorry for the camera jumps, i was just testing.

Cast: Frango Ssauro

Video documentation of Primal Source, July 19, 2008.

Specially commissioned by the City of Santa Monica, California, for Glow 08, Primal Source was an all-night performance/installation brought to life through the active participation of festival-goers (estimated at approx. 200,000 over the course of the night).

Located on the beach near the Pier in an area that had been specifically landscaped over the course of several days, and making use of a large-scale outdoor waterscreen/mist projection system, the mirage-like installation glowed with colours and ebullient patterns created in response to the competing and collaborative voices, music and screams of people nearby.

Cast: haque d+r

Cast: jarashi