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Diaryour shiny gold award, via the cameraphone of dan sloane, imagination’s tech master for the vj project. the ford vj area won the best exhibition feature area at friday’s event awards 2007 at the natural history museum. huzzah!
our shiny gold award, via the cameraphone of dan sloane, imagination’s tech master for the vj project. the ford vj area won the best exhibition feature area at friday’s event awards 2007 at the natural history museum. huzzah!
diary | 16 sep 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj · imagination
jasmin and mo hamming it up for the press. check mo smirking tee hee.
shot details ----
Frankfurt, 13.9.2007: Ford-Messestand IAA 2007 Frankfurt, Jasmin Judry und Mauritius Seeger arbeiten auf dem Ford-Messestand als DJ und VJ. — © Ford/Stark - Verwendung honorarfrei
diary | 14 sep 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj · imagination
jasmin finding her way round the vj setup, in a hall never again to be so quiet. opening soon…
…and this is what it was looking like when i hit the screengrab key-combo before putting the mac pro in its flight case to start its journey to frankfurt.
diary | 03 sep 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · vdmx · ford vj
as shown in the ‘pun me this’ entry, the *spark titler was used in nascent form at sheep music, and the promise to tidy-up and release as open-source software has been followed through. so, please find attached: sparktitler-v1.1.zip.
the titler’s interface allows you to take between two sets of title/subtitle, with the choice of four backgrounds: black / green / a quicktime movie or a folder of images. the output window will automatically go full-screen on the second monitor if it detects one is available at launch, otherwise it will remain a resizable conventional window.
it is released with the intention that it can be reused for other events without changing a single line of code: you can design the animation and incorporate quicktime movies in the design by editing the ‘GFX’ macro in the quartz composer patch, and its a matter of drag and drop replace the logo in the interface.
for those who wish to dig deeper and improve the whole package, the source is released under GPL. the xcode project provides an adequate shell for the patch, implemented with just two cocoa classes and an nib file complete with bindings between the qc patch and the interface window. the classes are required to tell the quartz composer patch where to find the resource directory of the application’s bundle (neccessary for any ‘image with movie’ nodes), and to subclass the output window so it is sent borderless to the second display if appropriate. features apart, there is certainly room for improvement, a ‘open file’ dialog instead of the raw text fields would be good, likewise solving the text field update issue.
if you do use it, let us know: operator@tobyz.net
diary | 30 jul 2007 | tagged: titler · release · *spark · vj · code · mac os · quartz composer | downloads: sparktitler-v1.1.zip
since there’s been *spark there’s been sparkav.co.uk, and its minimal form of home page and four links has always kinda charmed me. but at v1.3 after all these years, its time to take those genes and retool it into something that reflects the state of the nation 2007.
so here goes v2.0, with 440x700 pixels of featured project on the homepage and the ford vj geneva superedit a click away. now to lose that table for css, and embrace a whole world of flash presentation, not to mention getting the hosting sorted…
diary | 21 jun 2007 | tagged: *spark
in the museu d’art contemporani de barcelona bookshop, the two big vj tomes were prominently on display. which is both a super good thing for the scene, and personally pretty damn freaky to see yourself as an artist featured in such a venue.
diary | 16 jun 2007 | tagged: errata of life · *spark · vj · sónar
showing eloi and sean my live cinema work and the state of play on macs, with vdmx, quartz composer and image kernels
diary | 12 jun 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · vdmx · adventures · sónar
here is ‘re-engaging reactive graphics’ from a post or two ago, in its final projected form (or at least, one frame of one of the permutations i delivered). its on tonight too, as part of the south bank’s overture event, the re-opening of the royal festival hall. 10.30
diary | 09 jun 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · photo · light surgeons
here is a prototype/demonstration of using your own image kernel in vdmx. rather than being an effect, this is an A/B mixer that means you can use vdmx in the ‘old skool’ way, by mixing together two video streams rather than rendering the whole stack of layers. it also has controls like a DJ scratch mixer, so as well as a crossfader, you’ve got a fader for each channel, and a fader curve control.
to use, make a layer or group for the A channel and another for the B channel, and a layer at the top of the stack for your output. trigger the qc patch in the output layer, and assign the A and B layers/groups to its video input drop downs.
if you open the qc patch, you’ll see the video inputs get resized to the output res, as image kernels don’t handle different sized inputs too well, and then all the inputs are fed into an image kernel, ie a little filter written specially for the graphics card. in that there is some basic maths for applying a variable crossfade curve, and a line that adds the two inputs together. take a look, its not so hard; i have far more trouble with doing things like translating the crossfader curves into a mathematical expression than with the code itself.
so take this as a starter for ten if you’re interested. attached below.
i have my own mixer now that does three channel mixing just how i want, and its really cleaned up my vdmx interface[1] let alone the directness of the processing. sweet.
no more layer masks or fade to blacks getting in the way in the different layers and the preview window are now just post fx and not post masking/mixing fx as well. ↩︎
diary | 08 jun 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · vdmx · release | downloads: spark-DJmixer-v3.qtz
back in the early days of visuals in brum with the most talented stef lewandowski, computers could barely hack video and so the dynamic stuff was a combination of flash and good old mixer twiddling. flash was cool for making loops, at a basic level if you had a few layers, you made them different lengths and they would loop independently pretty much always giving you a new combination with each frame… do that with a pre-rendered loop and it becomes clear you’ve only got a second or two worth of frames pretty immediately. then you could bring in text read on the fly into your graphics and allsorts.
all that pretty much got left behind when i went to the single laptop with the vdmx video based vj setup, quicktime loops or nowt. much richer, much more interesting capabilities for mixing that video, but no dynamic/generative content.
so continuing the theme of the vj platform really delivering on the mac nowadays, with dual-core/decent-gfx-chips and osx/vdmx-in-cocoa, it was nice to have a commission to make a graphic layer for the light surgeon’s contribution to the reopening of the royal festival hall, a commission where keyframing it all would be madness, and new the visual identity of the south bank centre lent itself to a generative machine.
so not quite hello flash again like the days of old, but quartz composer parsing the audio spectrum and turning that into reactive combinations of the sbc’s weave. and given the pain of editing a 4xSD wide canvas from a huge media library, its actually a shame the whole thing couldn’t have been a prototype for the innovative live setups coming into view.
diary | 06 jun 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · light surgeons
today i programmed my first image kernel, another step on the journey of making custom technology to fulfil what i want to do artistically. and this one was with real, low-level code: its basically writing a shader for the graphics card, eek! actually not so hard at all, the code was pretty easy, it was the process of working out the maths required that took time to wrap my head back around.
osx is developing so well for video: you can write your image kernel in the appropriate quartz composer node, load that into a layer in the vj app vdmx, and then find all your kernel inputs natively displayed in the vj interface. so now not only do i have the exact kind of mixing i want processing at maximum efficiency, i’ve simplified my vdmx setup no-end with just one panel with all the controls, instead of a mish-mash of filters and blend modes spread around the different layers.
diary | 24 may 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · vdmx
for the nlab remix of people on sunday i made a generative titler, though it didn’t quite work out how i expected as the final patch didn’t want to load in the vj app despite some earlier testing. so vjing for me was largely reduced to changing the section number directly in the qc patch with its output running fullscreen, seen on the preview above. was cool though, seeing the titles drawing together from the bag of words i made from watching the clips: just like you don’t exactly know which way the vjing of the clips is going to go, you don’t know exactly what the titles are going to imply in it…
diary | 19 may 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · narrative lab · vj · live cinema
so here i am editing on the latest apple laptop using the latest final cut pro, and yet as the flow of the work goes, it feels just like 2001. editing in fcp2 on my beloved tibook. however, thats not to say the edit is equivalent: this is a motion graphic’d promo piece in sexy hd. amusingly enough, not even my cinema display has enough pixels.
diary | 16 may 2007 | tagged: errata of life · *spark · vj · ford vj
epic all-nighter in nottingham, ably abetted by the amsterdam crew of jilt, the pantoffeldiertjes vjs and v-king. travelling back by train on a bank holiday: not recommended.
diary | 07 may 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj
why does trying to make cool stuff involve half the train journey to the gig writing a shell script to batch treat your 80 graffiti cuts…
diary | 07 may 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj
three days of share, open media jamming. part of the setup is a widescreen projection of three 4x3 projectors/screens, which you can drive from a laptop with a matrox triplehead2go… very nice.
five screens, two narrative lab navigators, and the night starts early at the contemporary arts centre. story collector is a beautiful set, david last and mr projectile crisp over the pa, the mix working well, tag team keeping the story and aesthetic tracked.
diary | 27 apr 2007 | tagged: *spark · narrative lab · vj · vdmx · mapping · live cinema
its tuesday, its the first day not working for over two weeks, and with the next month or so paid up from this to devote to developing the setup and contributing to the cultural side. there is a little description of amsterdam on the photo page, suffice to say it was a smooth experience, we had it down, we had a nice time. very rewarding to have that experience after the challenges of getting the project to the 1.0 of geneva.
diary | 10 apr 2007 | tagged: *spark · vj · ford vj · imagination
