tagged: quartz composer

beyond visible things like keane3D, lots of work has been going on in the background with d-fuse this past year or so. some of it pitching, some of it pushing along internal projects, and at the moment a massive commercial job under NDA: all things which don’t really get to this diary. but i’m glad to announce a little preview of something i’ve been working on a while, which is transforming d-fuse live.

as part of electrovision on saturday the 18th july at roxy bar and screen, d-fuse will be performing for the first time with their high-def laptop live setup. it will be something between a test of the setup and a preview of the performance that will become ‘particle’, so all are welcome and beta-tester feedback appreciated!

there’s much more to say about what has been developed for this setup, but in the meantime here is the blurb i wrote for electrovision:

D-Fuse present a work-in-progress viewing of their new live performance, an experimental audio-visual triptych exploring urban conditions. Having mastered an HD production process for films such as Brilliant City and Surface, they have challenged themselves to bring this back into the live arena and with the graphical sensibility they are noted for.

pictured: vdmx work-in-progress setup, with amongst other things custom quartz composer 4x3 into 12x3 layer, backed by unreleased open-gl based qc plugins, and fronted by a native vidvox control layout.

diary | 09 jul 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · particle · dfuse · vj · electrovision · vdmx

abertura was the first time i really got to throw myself into a ‘particle-esque’ performance, using the d-fuse content with the live setup i’d created. as a warm-up for são paulo, it was a great one: the music and visuals really came together to give an intense show in the relatively small space of abertura’s hall, it really gave me a confidence boost.

i captured five minutes worth from abertura’s documentary footage, and its on vimeo here: http://vimeo.com/5731407

diary | 19 jul 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · particle · dfuse · *spark · vj · abertura · vdmx · live cinema

with the standard in the bank, it was onto the experiemental performance, the world premiere of ‘particle’.

Particle explores urban conditions on an abstracted level. While projects like Undercurrent, Latitude and Surface look at city life in its social and psychogeographical dimensions, Particle zooms in on details of the urban fabric and reveals a web of rhythms, patterns and textures.

particle is also in many ways a rite of passage for me; its not often you get the chance to take an HD film and transform it into the next-generation ‘we wrote the book on vjing’ d-fuse performance. there’s a lot more work to do, especially in creating an audio-visual syncronicity in collaboration with particle’s musician matthais kispert, but we rocked it and got such a positive response. there is a video showing some excerpts of the performance here: http://vimeo.com/5787905

i’m really happy with

• the staging with an 8x3 ‘cinematic’ canvas behind us and a mesh screen in front, with that projector throwing forward through the mesh into the venue+audience. people loved the ‘holographic’ or ‘3D’ nature this gave to the performance, and i personally love how the forward throwing projector beams the dancing lines and other abstractions of the performance throughout the venue, immersing the audience in the ‘trip’.
• the twin laptop setup enabled by the dvi crossfader i created and our solid state drives. the ability to tag-team the performance really transforms things, allowing the breathing space to check pace and prepare for the next section. and within each laptop, being able to seamlessly scale from cinematic playback to ultra-noodle is so empowering as a visualist.
• the customisation of my vj tool of choice, vdmx, allowing panels dedicated to doing creative things with 4x3 and 8x3 sources within the 12x3 canvas. this was achieved with a combination of quartz composer sources i made, fronted by an experimental vdmx feature allowing you to build your own interface plugins, and backed by a set of quartz composer plug-ins i’m working on that scale to any canvas rather than working per-pixel in the source resolution.

thanks to itaú cultural for the photo

diary | 25 jul 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · particle · dfuse · vj · on_off · vdmx · live cinema

after a month with a heavy dose of xcode on the side, its up to newcastle clutching two fledgling applications to marry with newcastle library’s digitised photo archive, a bunch of iMacs clustered around a 1080P plasma screen, and the memories of the visiting public. it was a heavy weekend of being there with the installation by day and further coding by night, but out of this a very real and user tested photobank has been born.

as the latest manifestation of my personal practice, and something that will very likely become part of my PhD research, there is much more to say than a quick diary post can stretch to. so the full project page will come, i guess in the meantime its easiest to point the lineage to kinetxt which was - with novak - my first attempt at creating an environment where layers of interpretation are encouraged, and they in turn add up to something interesting and unexpected. photobank tries to address this in a more focussed and repeatable way, starting with a base of media archive, and ending with a flow of illustrated short verse.

at the nuts and bolts level, its a full screen photo browsing and annotation application that can be run on many computers for mass interaction by the public, which are networked to a central computer holding the photo archive and running the central display, which acts as both an attractor for the public, animating through the archive and latest annotatations, and as the writer’s tool for creating and showing mini-narratives by selecting six photos and their annotations, and handwriting short verse around them. all written as native mac osx applications using objective-c/cocoa and quartz composer.

diary | 01 nov 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · photobank · *spark · vj · code
- mac os

there’s no denying its like a flight deck of buttons, but props to vdmx’s configurability and plug-in friendliness. full playback control of both single screens and the dualhead spanning as quicktime sources, and a hardcore quartz composer patch wrapping a lot of custom openGL code, fronted by an interface builder laid out UI panel.

diary | 18 feb 2010 | tagged: quartz composer · particle · dfuse · *spark · vj · vdmx

tresor backstage, 1am, get to the final compile of here+now for the 3am performance. there is never enough time in this world, and for experimental projects on the side doubly so. the dream of just hanging out at a festival…

diary | 11 jun 2010 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · code · mac os · video-in · visual berlin · herenow

there is a big d-fuse production in the works, where the brief rather wonderfully was emphasising interaction with and within the audience. as briefs often do, things have changed a lot since the heady time of working on and winning the pitch, but the core of it is still generative graphics and punter control from the club floor. and so here, courtesy of dr.mo’s crack team of coders is an in-development iPad app talking over WiFi to a QC plugin, where my two fingers-as-proxies-for-collaborating-audience-members are sketching locally and that is being incorporated on the club’s screens.

diary | 06 oct 2010 | tagged: quartz composer · liveness · dfuse · vj · code · ios · mac os · engaging audiences

happiness is twelve hex bytes, generated by a pocketable custom LED fixture on detecting a bounce, transmitting that via xBee, receiving into the computer via RS232, being parsed correctly, outputting into a QC comp, doing a dance, and commanding back to the fixtures via Artnet via DMX via xBee.

diary | 16 oct 2010 | tagged: quartz composer · vj · code · mac os · i/o · dfuse · embedded

there is now a mac pro in china running DFD, something that has been consuming my time for a while now. the roadshow d-fuse have been developing is our first big foray into automated dynamic content, lighting and audience interaction, and so without us being there for every gig holding it down with a hacked-up vj setup we needed something that you could just power on and the show would start. and so d-fuse/dynamic was hatched, a quicktime and quartz composer sequencer which reads in presets and its input/output functionality from a folder we can remotely update, and essentially just presents a “next” button to the on-site crew.

what i think is particularly novel about DFD is it was designed to output a consistent framerate, rendering slightly ahead of time so the fluctuations in QC and QT frame rendering are buffered out. i’m not sure is the effort/reward of this was worth it, but it will be an interesting code base to come back to and re-evaluate.

for the roadshow, it is playing out any number of four sources at 1280x576, including the generative, controlled by iPads in the audience and LED balls on stage, audio-reactive core of the show, sending the central 1024x576 to the main screen, driving 10 LED 72x1px strips from the remaining 576x128px on either side, and sending DMX back out to the stage lighting and LED balls.

big thanks to vade, luma beamerz, and memo for helping me one way or the other grok anti-aliased framebuffer rendering.

having spent much time i didn’t have trying to get 64bit QTX giving me openGL frames at QuickTime 7 efficiencies, life saving thanks also to vade and tom for v002 movie player 2.0, for which there is patch back with them giving it the ability to play the QT audio to a specific output.

lastly, a perennial thanks to kineme, couldn’t have gone this direction without knowing their DMX, Axis Camera, and audio patches were out there.

i’m not sure what to do with the code at the moment. it was made as a generic platform, but its current state is still very much tied to that specific project. or rather, the inevitable last minute hacking as it hit china needs to be straightened out. it has been made and funded as a tool for d-fuse to build on, so that needs to be taken into account too. in short, if anybody has a concrete need for such a thing, get in touch and we’ll see what could be done.

diary | 27 oct 2010 | tagged: quartz composer · vj · video-out · code · mac os · dfuse

as part of the rhythms and visions event, a day of workshops was organised. los angeles visual artists - lava had the morning, and covered the past and present of ‘visual music’ works. mike, matthias and i had the afternoon, which we nailed the four hours precisely with a tour through the d-fuse oeuvre and a journey through our particle production process. the latter was my main contribution, and its a tricky balance to give: lots of really cool stuff – shooting, taking crops, building abstracting effects – but with what can reduce down to a sea of noodles and buttons. pretty happy though, good feedback that the thread was there and it all tied up: people got it.

diary | 23 apr 2011 | tagged: teaching · talk · video-out · vdmx · quartz composer · dfuse · vj

and how did those live graphics make it to the screen? i sat down and took the idea of *spark titler from sheep music and remade it as a fully fledged cocoa+quartz composer application. the idea being it can’t muck up: animation designed to gracefully transfer from state to state, participant names pre-filled in a drop-down menu, no mouse cursors on the output, text fields that commit their edits on pressing take… the little details that make-or-break a live application. oh - and it exports its title animations as quicktimes for integration with playback pro.

diary | 04 sep 2011 | tagged: code · mac os · video-out · quartz composer · titler · *spark · just tell the truth · vj

providing visuals from 5pm to 11pm was somewhat daunting given i’d pretty much chucked away all my random-gig vj clips a year or three back, they wanted it all america’s cup themed, and oh: 1080P.

well, nothing like a bit of fear to rise to the challenge: rocked it, aided and abetted by

• cuts culled from 200GB of america’s cup footage downloaded from their broadcast server
• a few choice compass rose type animations
• some custom quartz composer patches
• a live stills camera
• the dvi mixer pumping out 1080P into their system, but the laptops only working at the (good chunk lower) actual resolution of the screen.

wish I had got a photo of the big americas-cup cuts glitch mash-up i had going on, but then again, it was all about how it moved with the music.

diary | 14 sep 2011 | tagged: video-out · video-in · vdmx · quartz composer · *spark · vj · americas cup

how did joanna run the screen? with *spark titler v3: no longer a now-and-next titler, more the means for a live brand video. into an animation template go tweets, titles and all sorts of media, and the user is presented with a sane way of wrangling that media and controlling the output.

the app as a whole is mac-native in the best of ways, with the behaviours a naive user might expect. i’m especially proud of the interface, which takes the standard elements and extends them where necessary^[1], all to be used without fear of killing the output or screwing up the content.

diary | 14 oct 2011 | tagged: code · mac os · quartz composer · titler · *spark · vj · MADE-BY

sane control of the media and scenography needs to be partnered with the animation mechanics to handle it all gracefully. luckily, thats what i do – and what tools like quartz composer enable – and i had the best materials to work with in the form of made-by’s brand video. it’s great. watch it, and you’ll also see how perfect it was to be remade into a never-ending animation with dynamic content interspersed with the hand-animated elements.

best of all, now i have the interface and back-end largely worked out i can concentrate on creating bespoke animation for future gigs: everybody wins.

diary | 14 oct 2011 | tagged: code · mac os · quartz composer · titler · *spark · vj · MADE-BY

at the heart of the brain was the increasingly inappropriately named *spark titler, collating all the media and channelling it to the screen. it runs the screen, and gives just what you need to be responsive to the moment without breaking the visual illusion. so… *spark screenrunner?

whatever its grown-up name is, it monitored a fileshare for photos incoming from the caption-shot camera, illustrations and data-vis from ciaran and caroline’s laptops, listened to twitter accounts and hashtags, and, wonderfully, got updates in real-time from convotate, stef’s conversation annotation web-app. a technical shout-out here to pusher, the HTML5 websocket powered realtime messaging service, and to luke redpath’s objective-c library. and via the venue’s many-input HD vision mixer and a quartz composer patch or so more, we had treated feeds from above ciaran’s illustration pad, photoshop screen and whatnot.

it might be that you have to do this kind of job to grok the need, but i really think there’s something in *spark screenrunner, whether its just titling and transitioning between two presenters’ powerpoints or this kind of high-end craziness.

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: code · mac os · quartz composer · titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · video-out · engaging audiences

after a bout of yet more *spark screenrunner back-end building up – libPusher, ‘event’ document packages that encapsulate the media and graphic template, the all important enqueue new – it was onto what really set this gig apart.

visually, i’d always thought of the rendered output as 2d motion graphics, the made by movie re-working being the canonical example. but here the content wasn’t coming in from the virtual ether, or just signing who was in front of the screen, we were visualising the venue we were in, and it was laid out with yurts, with conversation threads and ideas coming from each of them. we needed a map, we needed a way of collating the ideas… and one-creative-process-later, i was loving the result: animating around a 3d tabletop diorama of post-its and plastic yurt board-game pieces, with polaroid snaps falling down on one side and A4 sheets sellotaped down on the other.

true 3d in quartz composer was a branch out into the unknown for me, and not without its developer terror moments finding out what it was happy with and what it wasn’t. bottom line, while there’s issues a-plenty with qc’s 3d rendering, couple it with sketchup for quick 3d modelling and globs of javascript to handle the data-scape, colour me impressed. it was captivating watching the animation unfold as the live content came in - and a proud moment.

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: quartz composer · titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · engaging audiences

friends who made a cinema camera out of industrial cameras are getting excited about gig-e vision for live video work. as am i.

more on this will come. in the meantime, hospitality at brixton academy was round the corner, had a friend running visuals, and i’d just got our plug-in running at 60fps.

• soak test with d’n’b frequencies: check.
• flexibility of just dropping in the tiny camera on it’s single cable: check.
• image quality: check, the cheap-ass lens i used was surprisingly good, and i have a high-quality prime lined up.

while i’m here, justin has done a fine job with the hospitality staging - the massive ‘h’ fixture is proper class, and the visuals were perfectly designed for a judicious minimum of LED panels.

diary | 27 sep 2013 | tagged: code · mac os · video-in · quartz composer · gev · vj

watch, it’s really quite good. an online video is not the same as an installation, but put it full-screen, keep with it and you’ll get a real sense of the mounting intensity and serious subject.

diary | 19 oct 2013 | tagged: dfuse · quartz composer · video-out

a screenrunner client wanted an animating tiled layout. it’s surprisingly non-trivial to code, at least if you want to go beyond hard-coding a few grid layouts. thankfully, the problem is academically interesting too, and lo! there’s a paper on spatial packing of rectangles, complete with MaxBinRectPack algorithm and c++ implementation. respect to jukka jylänki.

getting this working for me was time worth investing, and i’ve released the results: a quartz composer patch and animation technique. it’s up on github, and is something best seen in action, so check the quick demo video on vimeo.

diary | 18 nov 2013 | tagged: code · mac os · quartz composer · titler · vj

james sheridan saw SPK-RectPack, and invited me to see the dome setup he develops the tech for: igloo, the company, could do with something like screenrunner running in the dome, and more generally james is a creative-coding guy keen to meet like-minds. well, i was impressed; it wasn’t long before screenrunner was running on the dome’s mac pro^[1], and not long after that james was organising a creative coding night in their mini demo dome.

as part of that he invited the london quartz composer group along, and invited me to show what quartz composer was doing in screenrunner. i was happy to talk about it^[2], i really like the mix of cocoa for the app, OpenGL + QCRenderer for the rendering engine and Quartz Composer.app to visually patch each client’s bespoke design and animation together. it’s not often i can show what lies underneath!

diary | 10 feb 2014 | tagged: quartz composer · titler · video-out · dome · talk