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

First, I’m pleased to announce that my students’ work from last year’s Big Screens class is featured in the Processing exhibition.

In honor of this achievement as well as this coming fall’s repeat extravaganza, the “Most Pixels Ever” library is moving! I’m slowly getting rid of the old site and shifting over to google code hosting, which has lots of great features for collaborative open source projects.

http://code.google.com/p/mostpixelsever/

Because of the performance issues with v1.0 (especially on windows), I’m rewriting the library to use UDP. So far my tests are promising and it looks like this new version should be speedier and more reliable. Preliminary downloads and source are available on the new site.

Here’s a video of our new test set-up in action at ITP:

http://www.vimeo.com/1517179

Also, I should point out that the library will ultimately be expanded to include several different messaging “modes,” depending on exactly what type of multi-screen application you are building. Right now, the only mode available is overkill mode where the server and client have to shake hands for every single frame rendered.

Finally, there’s a major bug briefly described on the “issues” tab. Am working to fix it now, but if anyone discovers anything, please let me know.

The Joy of Interlacing from Videopia on Vimeo.

As it happens, interlacing is not a diabolical technology invented just to make your life miserable by creating those annoying Venetian Blind patterns on digital videos. (Who knew?)

The wonderful people of Videopia don’t just explain interlacing – they defend it, starting with its early history. Then they explain how to deal with removing interlacing in the progressive-scan world of Internet distribution. And if you’re still not clear on when that horizontal pattern of lines on your video is a good thing and when it’s a bad thing, this will make it clear.

It’s by far the single best explanation I’ve seen, and they’ve done it all with fantastic production values.

Now if people will just watch the darned thing, maybe we won’t see all this poor deinterlacing in online videos on YouTube. (Stats were surprisingly low when this came online, so have at it, Visualist Nation, and spread the love around!)

Any further tips (or questions) to add to their interlacing advice, ye tech-savvy visualists? Let us know in comments.

Lots more smart advice at Videopia. Via Jamie Wilkinson’s FriendFeed

Updated: Richard Lainhart writes with a still-better technique. I agree, absolutely - got so distracted by the elegant explanation of interlacing itself and its history that I neglected to pay as much attention to what they were actually suggesting! Of course, this won’t work in all cases, meaning you’re back to the video technique. But since a lot of you have cameras capable of shooting as Richard describes, this could be helpful.

The deinterlacing techniques mentioned in the video all will introduce artifacts of some sort in the image. If you use leave the fields in, you’ll still see interlace combing on the edges of objects in motion, even if the frame isn’t paused. Interpolated interlacing can be better, but you’ll still often see blockiness, sawtooth effects, or other such artifacting on straight lines and hard-edged objects, as no interpolation method is perfect.

If you can, you’ll get better results with this method - shoot everything in full 1080i HDV, and reduce the frame to one-half resolution in After Effects. When you bring the HDV footage into AE, convert it to square pixels but tell AE to not deinterlace it (in the Interpret Footage dialog.) Then scale that image to half-size in a 960×540 comp. This has the effect of throwing out every other field and reducing the frame to widescreen SD format, and you’ll get perfect, clear progressive full frames. From there, crop to 4:3 for standard SD, or scale up to 1280×720 for 720P HD - scaling the image up in AE will introduce some softness, but it will still look better than 720i footage when viewed on a computer screen.

All the footage on my YouTube site was processed this way, and none of it has any visible field artifacting.

http://www.youtube.com/rlainhart

---

© Peter Kirn for Create Digital Motion, 2008. |
Permalink |
11 comments

Add to del.icio.us

Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under News.

Nace un trazo en el centro de la superficie rectangular.
Este trazo avanza hacia arriba y gira suavemente en forma azarosa. Tanto su grosor, su velocidad como su giro oscilan de la misma forma; mediante la función NOISE (de Ken Perlin: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlin_noise). Este trazo puede dar inicio a una ramificación, dependiendo de su factor de fertilidad.
El trazo termina cuando choca con otro trazo existente.

En variaciones posteriores se introdice el concepto de EDAD. Los trazos, al envejecer, aclaran su tinta.

Cast: Herbert Spencer

This is simply my original ‘Music is Math’ animation with one very small but significant difference, I changed the random seed number. This number is basically the starting point for all random numbers throughout the code used to create the branches, particle motion etc.

I thought it would be interesting to see and compare the difference between the first and second videos, with only changing one number. The original seed value was 1973, the year I was born, and I was thinking of what other numbers I could use for a second video, and Nelson Mandela’s prison number came to mind - 46664, which is what is used here.

It’s the exact same video and code, except the new seed number (I also let it run a little longer), and although pretty much the same material, there are nice moments not seen in the first, which makes it a worth while (and very cheap) experiment. Promise to do something a bit more creative next time..

Cast: glennmarshall

Visualist duo Ivan and Jose have set up a new blog with some very inspiring experiments in live visual control:

http://tratadodeintegracion.cc/stream/

If you speak Spanish, you’ll find this to be an invaluable set of resources. If you don’t, you’ll simply enter a hacking wonderland with some mysterious images and videos and (even with no knowledge of the language) still some very handy links.

Among their accomplishments so far: a DIY multi-touch rig controlling Processing and Max/MSP (with MaxLink handling communication between the two).

And for those of you who prefer hardware, here’s the Numark Total Control working in concert with Apple’s free visual patching environment Quartz Composer. Live generative 3D visuals, ho! If you’re a Total Control owner, the blog post has complete details with screen shots and JavaScript scripts that do all the important translation work.

See also the i2offplusr3nder Flickr stream for lots more 3D/Processing goodies. We’ll be staying tuned to this one.

---

© Peter Kirn for Create Digital Motion, 2008. |
Permalink |
No comment

Add to del.icio.us

Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under News.

Interstellar Sugar - Suryummy from Suryummy on Vimeo.

Friend of CDMo Suryummy shares this audiovisual motion sequence, imagining what the world would be like if you cooked … in … outer space.

Good stuff. And no, The Frugal Gourmet hasn’t been dropping acid. (Suryummy does suggest that this could be Bowie with a cooking show, which I like.) But Suryummy does share his tools:

• Maya
• Adobe CS3
• Particular
• Ableton Live
• Native Instruments Reaktor
• Native Instruments Absynth

Tasty. Keep those videos from vimeo (and elsewhere) coming.

At some point we need to go over what a workflow would be like doing this kind of thing in a live tool like Processing. It’s tricky, and of course necessitates some sacrifices in the visual category to allow for real-time performance – but it can be rewarding. (And there’s no saying you can’t do both.)

---

© Peter Kirn for Create Digital Motion, 2008. |
Permalink |
2 comments

Add to del.icio.us

Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under News.

This video shows one of my experiments to send a wireless signal from one Xbee module to another. The idea was to make a box that contained an arduino board, a tilt switch and an Xbee module. It would be powered by a 9V battery. If you shook this box it would trigger the tilt switch and this would send a radio signal to the other Xbee module which would be attached to the PC via USB. This data would then run into the computer and affect the graphics in a processing sketch, making the graphics shake around like snow.

Cast: EllyBee

Cast: +zero

As one or the other might have noticed by now, this blog has not gotten a lot of love (or any attention in general) from me for a long, long time now and this will most likely be one of the last posts over here…

The reason for all this silence has been that last autumn I decided to finally take the step I’d been preparing for such a long time and so I’d finally setup my own studio to work more freely, collaborate more, opensource more and generally be able to focus more on interesting computational design projects, be they commercial or artistic.

PostSpectacular is here, along with a new blog and a list of recent projects. I’ve also nailed down a little manifesto for this new endeavour to help myself and my (new) clients.

Giving interested people more insight into our way of working is also an important part of this new setup and inspired by the manifesto so far I’ve written up quite detailed documentations (incl. one with a making-of video) for these 4 recent projects in the hope to share & inspire:

Print magazine cover design, August 2008 A generative typographic sculpture realized with Processing and 3D printing

Faber Finds Created a software solution to generate unique book covers for this new print-on-demand service.

Nokia Friends Software animation instrument and physics driven character generator.

Advanced Beauty: Enerugii, pt.II Audio responsive HD motiongraphics piece for this collaborative DVD project.

At this point, I just want to say thanks to everyone who’s taken the time to come by here now and in the past and I hope to see you again at the new place! Danke! Btw. At the time of this writing, the new studio website is still a bit rough around the edges, but in true agile manner it’s already been running for 10 months on a customized/themed version of DokuWiki and most of the important content is there now..

Basic 2D lissajous figures.

Cast: Daniel Dias

Memo has released the source code for his optical flow/psychadelic fluids project, used at the Glastonbury Pi Installation.

Seeing as a lot of what I’m doing is based on open-source software and the good intention of others, I think its fair that I release some source code too… So I’ve tried to clean and comment a bit of the code I used on the psychedelic interactive fluid and particles demo (also used on the Glastonbury 2008 PI Installation.

This is built in C++ for speed and efficiency, but Memo has previously produced similarly psychedelic fluids in Processing.

---

© Jaymis for Create Digital Motion, 2008. |
Permalink |
No comment

Add to del.icio.us

Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under Asides.