DSP-Hardware Plattform

[Linus]

Hi

Did you ever see one of these new DSP-Audiocards like Pulsar is one, with that can you can play Softwaresynthesizer or use audio-plugins without using the CPU for that (has also A/D-changers and digital routing and mixing abilitys)?
Why not built some System for Video?
would be great to have a Plattform like a audio-midi sequencer is (logic audio or Cubase have the "VST-Plattform and DirectX" for plugins as example) and only add video effect plugins to your videos or play videosynthesizer or sampler on the DSP?s of the Card!
I know that the Pulsar-Pro have 15 Shark DSP?s so it has enuff Power to manage large arrangements with many plugins and so on but how much dsp?s would be enuff for a Software Videosynthesizer plugin??

regards

Linus

[orx-qx]

3D Labs is making something similar. Their new line of graphic cards will be equipped with several programmable SIMD graphic processors with its own command processor and memmory management. It will be a scalable parallel "Visual Processing Unit" for 3D graphics and also for acceleration of Photoshop and video effects.

As they say:
"Digital photographers and video editors are expected to use VPU-enabled boards to accelerate the latest Adobe? Photoshop? filters and Premiere? effects."

There will be several models, some low-cost for Direct X 9, Photoshop acceleration etc., other highend for 3D graphics and video professionals with OpenGL 2.0

With Creative they want to make it mainstream, sounds promising.


http://www.3dlabs.com/whatsnew/pressreleases/pr02/02-05-03-vpu.htm

[MoRpH]

In a graphics card..... bah!!! when will these ppl realize that ppl are using laptops more and more (PC industry in aust is ciurrently running on laptop sales) create solutions that are available to both desktop and laptop users rather than sticking with this out moded internal card garbage....

It sounds good but without a laptop solution I know "I" won't be using it.

[spark]

check out thread 'hardware fx unit'

if you've seen motu 828's you'll realise this is the way forward: an external rackable box connected through a fat pipe with everything dedicated, shielded, etc etc at pro specs... i wanna dv version with dv dsps!


http://www.vjforums.com/showthread.php?threadid=11

[MoRpH]

Yeah that thread has relevant points (actually more relvant to this thread than that thread actually :) )

but I still think my box (from the thread) would be best and just use a lappy for triggering and mix, keep the FX in 'ardware :)

No reason the mix/video input functions couldn't be helped by a nice external box connected via firewire or a PCMCIA slot (like I metioned in another thread) :)

[spark]

but my dear morph, that is the whole point: using dsps is keeping fxs in hardware, but with your lappy as intelligent controller/interface...

[MoRpH]

yeah I know.... but laptops are a shit interface, I'd rather have something with knobs and sliders, and I have explained in may other software Vs hardware threads b4 I personally don't want software in the way causing problems.

[vjpixylight]

HEHEhe,
I am trying to get creamware(maker of Pulsar) to do exactly this!!
with pulsar software, comes many 3rd party audio soft plugins,
and I was hoping that someone would eventually get going on this...
I have a SRB (creamware) 15 dsp card and am itchin to get it into pulsar audio/video sampling...
Creamware claims that each of there sharc DSP chips, is equal to the G4 450 mghz proccesor, so I am sure that DSP has a video proccessing future...
As for Morph's accessment that it needs to be ported to lappies,
sorry ole chap, but it will have to go through the the process of acceptance in the regular desktop world first, before it hits the always lagging lappy world..

I also have a 3D labs graphic accellerator card, which does some
3D acceloration enhancements, but I think that DSP is really the best way to go about non-CPU enhancing...

anyhow, anyone with c++ programing, please look into the pulsar 3rd party plugin market, and make something happen with a video sampler please...

[MoRpH]

Originally posted by vjpixylight
As for Morph's accessment that it needs to be ported to lappies,
sorry ole chap, but it will have to go through the the process of acceptance in the regular desktop world first, before it hits the always lagging lappy world..

Well yeah thats if the job is done with DSP(if there isn't already a lappy/DSP solution)........ but if we create our own solution we can design it to be lappy compatible from the start.

On a side note, there is no DSP stuff that is designed/used with laptops??? I find that a little on with all the audio acts now using laptops in there acts I would have though someone would have done this already.

[vjpixylight]

On a side note, there is no DSP stuff that is designed/used with laptops??? I find that a little on with all the audio acts now using laptops in there acts I would have though someone would have done this already.

I know morph, there is DSP for everything these days...they are in fx processors, on many sound cards, and you would think in lappies...lord knows, my internet toaster appliance will get DSP before my lappy...

[MoRpH]

USB DSP audio box for lappies

http://www.griffintechnology.com/audio/pwrwave.html

maybe this could be used to do something????

[wellREDman]

someone care to give a jargon free explanation of the term dsp?

[Linus]

maybe
digital sound processor ?

Linus

[vjpixylight]

Close Linus...DSP means Digital Signal Processing...
that is why it can work for digital video processing...

Morph, the USB box would need to be hacked to be able to get digital video thru it...as it is made for audio...
I will have a look around for DSP made especially for vids, and let the forum know what I find...
The only Video DSP card I know of is the ICE'd card from the makers od Media Cleaner...

[wellREDman]

ok can someone explain the principles involved and why people think it'll help vjing

(surely digital signal processing covers everything that happens in a computer:nod: )

[vjpixylight]

Damn it Jim...I'm only a doctor...

Well,
I just spent the last couple of hours researching DSP and wrote a nice little article about DSP, and decided to add a pic of a DSP flowchart, that was a bitmap image...

oops...no bitmaps allowed..and when I hit the 'back' button, the whole article was gone...poof, like a puff of smoke...

So instead of an article, I wil just post a link that I found that will fully explain how a certain maker of DSP is implementing it for realtime video processing...
The link is:
http://www.oxfordmicrodevices.com/A436_summary.html
and is the answer to all that we have been wanting in realtime video processing...
Now it is just up to some of you coders out there to write a VJ soft around it...

for those who are looking for a PCI based card(PC) with DSP, there is this card...http://www.innovative-dsp.com/products/video.htm

for you coders looking to find and evaluate a DSP based card
to use for making your your VJ software, try: http://www.ateme.fr/gb/products/products.html

[eXhale]

Originally posted by vjpixylight
I just spent the last couple of hours researching DSP and wrote a nice little article about DSP, and decided to add a pic of a DSP flowchart, that was a bitmap image...

oops...no bitmaps allowed..and when I hit the 'back' button, the whole article was gone...poof, like a puff of smoke...

woooahh :( you should always save long texts in notepad or other text editing softwares, or at least copy the whole text before hitting submit... you never know what might happen.

:sad:

[MoRpH]

Yeah had that happen to me b4, but yeah thanksfully I had it pasted into notepad aswell :)

Still would be great to read a full VJ perspective on DSP.... please consider re-writing it :)

BTW did you see the last rev date on the Oxford site.... Rev. June 26, 2001.... :-( lets hope its almost finished rather than dead. I have just emailed them asking for a status of the chip :)

[vjpixylight]

Well I should have known that, but I do now..
I usually do the copy thing for these things, but just couldn't wait to get it up...
oh well, I won't be able to do much with posting for the next 2 and 1/2 months cause I don't know when I will be able to get online since I will be on the move, you know...

hope the DSP info is usefull...

[spark]

ok can someone explain the principles involved and why people think it'll help vjing

its like the best of both worlds: computer/software flexibility with the guaranteed performance of dedicated hardware.

frees your computer's cpu to concentrate on the organising and a dedicated chip to concentrate on processing the video, ie let them both do what they're good at.

another way of thinking of it, is that its the logical extension of the way modern hardware is going anyway. a v5 or mxpro is a bunch of effects boards tied together with an embedded software controller tied to a few buttons. now replace that controller&interface with a computer and voila! it becomes customisable, midiable anythingable...

[spark]

On a side note, there is no DSP stuff that is designed/used with laptops??? I find that a little on with all the audio acts now using laptops in there acts I would have though someone would have done this already.

I know morph, there is DSP for everything these days...they are in fx processors, on many sound cards, and you would think in lappies...lord knows, my internet toaster appliance will get DSP before my lappy...

we don't need to get into a desktop vs lappy debate here, if we think of a solution rather than chip. imagine a rackmount unit with its own subsystem of drives, connections and the like. connect via a fat pipe such as firewire and you're laughing. this is the way the audio world has been going, and i've seen pro-video rackmount breakout boxes etc already. check out motu's audio units (http://www.motu.com)

[vjpixylight]

agreed that future systems will be DSP based specialized processing...
nice descriptioon of the jist of DSP, Spark...
so again coders...anyone willing to take a gambling and leap into the future???
no doubt it might be risky, but you never know..
.
Motu and Creamware are doing good things on the audio end of it, but being able to customize a A/V rackmount is where it is heading...DSP is the specilized engine that will make this happen...

so lappies or desktops?? well it is still easier to fly with a lappie...

[spark]

and ride your bike!

[MoRpH]

Originally posted by MoRpH
BTW did you see the last rev date on the Oxford site.... Rev. June 26, 2001.... :-( lets hope its almost finished rather than dead. I have just emailed them asking for a status of the chip :)

>Just wondering if the A436TM Parallel Video DSP Chip is still >under
>development, finished or has been cancelled???
>
>Regards
>
>Grant Muir

It is currently being fabricated and is a key component in our new digital video security system.


OMDI Sales

Oxford Micro Devices, Inc.
The new generation of image processing chips and systems
Lantern Ridge Office Park
731 Main Street, Building 2
Monroe, CT 06468 USA
tel. 203-445-0562 x1, fax 203-445-0564
sales@oxfordmicrodevices.com, http://www.oxfordmicrodevices.com/

[vjpixylight]

hey good news on the DSP front..
James Brundage has informed me that a DSP package is in the works..
Here is the post...

We've been in development of such a style of app for about 6 months now,
and hopefully will have the product out by the end of the year, but the
point is that we're talking our time. We are attempting to include all
of the effects from all of the existing programs in a much more stable
and less CPU intensive architecture.

Insofar we've got every filter MotionDive has, all but 3 filters
Resolume has (those too shall get done), about half of ArKaos' filters
(with the other half looking fairly straightforward)... and we're
working towards a skin based GUI, so not only can our program do what
MotionDive or Resolume does it can also look like they look. We are
also planning to go NLE + Realtime F/X once this version is out, and
then planning on approaching large companies to package the software for
distribution with DV cameras, USB capture devices, and the like. If
this plan is successful, not only will we FINALLY have a stable VJ soft,
we will also have a blazingly fast NLE and the ability for any kid who
gets a DV cam for his birthday to being playing at being a VJ.

P.S. Just tested SoftScan for outputting ArKaos, SVD1, and Aestesis.
Works like a charm.

[infopocalypse]

Not DSP (well there will be capture support and probably firewire in (and hopefully firewire out, if not firewire out by the next version))... I was referring to the talk of poorly coded video apps, the hobbyist programs. I'm sure DSP will eventually end up in there as the basic goal of this program is to take the realtime market and then take the NLE market, combining both into one superefficient package, and I cannot imagine any time that DSP would not be involved in this. (WDM is actually a method of accessing DSP).

There are a lot of software based video effects, and most likely some software based DSP... DSP is really old and predates the hardware. DSP is also the process by which digital is turned into analog, so DSP is used when faxing something, or when printing, or when displaying a single bitmap on the screen.

[vjpixylight]

sorry about that,
I guess I misunderstood what you were saying James, and was hoping a little to hard for a DSP hardware solution...so what you are saying is that you are working on a coding solution to the slow VJ apps? Does DSP hardware have any thing to do with it? I don't quite understand the connection...

[LEVLHED]

Originally posted by vjpixylight
any kid who
gets a DV cam for his birthday to being playing at being a VJ.

ahh yes, the rich white boy invasion.....

-ITS COMING-

[infopocalypse]

The rich white boy invasion per se, but I think it would be cool if VJing became something people could get into on a hobbyist level without massive fiduciary investment. I mean I tell my mastercard joke to get people to know how expensive it was for me to get into the Industry:

Videonics MX-Pro Video Mixer: $2000
Epson Power Lite 500c projector: $3000 (these are prices a while back).
Watching 100 crackheads lie in front of your screens like they're the coolest thing in the world: priceless.

There are some things money can't buy. For everything else there's mastercard.

But as far as the hobbyist goes we really have two choices: (a) people get interested in doing visuals in the form of Geiss and Winamp AVS, or (b) people get interested in doing visuals in the form of an app capable or really performing.

Which would you rather?

James

[infopocalypse]

EyeCandy was going back and forth about the DSP chips, a lot of people with a massive misunderstanding of the chips themselves. spark responded to one of your messages regarding the ppor code found in people doing VJ programs as a hobby, talked about

if somone would invest as little as $100,000 (less than the cost of 10 of those dsp chips) in a piece of vj software (or better still an opensource realtime video effects plugin structure) then you would quickly have the ability to create just about any effect you can think of and the programmers could afford to spend more time on the project

And that is what I replied to. Will hardware speed up the software... inevitably. But the soft is being written on two machines, a AMD 700 with no specialized video hardware (an ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 32, which isn't expensive but isnt dualhead), very generic audio hardware (a SoundBlaster live value, which has MIDI support), 128 MB RAM, and nothing to speak of to tweak the system or help it out. The second machine is my Dell lappie, which has a dual head NVidia 32, 1.2 Ghz, and 512 of RAM. We're going to add a third machine into our main test group in the next few days (as I transfer over the project).

Furthermore, the rasterizer which forms the core of the program itself (something capable of skewing, rotating, flipping, flopping, and scaling any image) was written to do 3D stuff on a 233 Mhz machine, for which it managed. It is our sincere hope that we will be able to full emulate the existing functions out there, improve upon them where we can, and add a few new ones as well.

I personally believe that good hardware is important, but all the good hardware in the world does not make a good product to run on them. At present we have design computers running Photoshop that, in order to skew an image of 320/240, will take a few seconds. Please tell me how Photoshop is then written efficiently when our program does such without fail 30 times a second. This same philosophy applies to dealing with operating systems and other applications in general.

To wit:

I recently made a loop using Avid, which leaves Premiere in the dust in render times, in something that involved merely flipping an original image and superimposing it 50/50 above the old one. Said loop is 10 minutes long, and took the program almost a half hour to render the effect before it could be exported. Something seems very wrong with this picture, again, when we have existing filters which will do the above in realtime with quite a few clock cycles to spare, enough clock cycles to output the frame, I would think, to a file (which is the process of rendering). The best products for such purpose in the world are taking 30 minutes for something a video mixer can do instantenously. If VJ apps took their own jobs seriously, (1) we could find ourselves in a position to pull the rug out of the non-linear and graphic design markets. There is literally nothing tougher computer wise than realtime video effects, especially if they involved 3d as well. In fact, 3d is often easier on a machine as hardware acceleration has turned 3d graphics into a more hardware-efficient endevour. Some DSP chips are designed to do the same to video... but this is like putting an extra hundred kilos to hit a wall with a battering ram on its side.... it will break but it would go a lot easier if it were made right in the first place.

James

[spark]

that was actually sleepytom, but hey yeah. well my interest in dsp takes completely the opposite tack. i want to be able to create interesting, experimental systems, and explore where others haven't gone. you need as high level programming languages as possible for such work, and they by definition aren't going to get the best out of your cpu - that is why you are developing the superoptimised one-size-fits-all app...

so: i see programming environments like max/nato, which like lego allow you to build whatever your imagination can conceive from a set number of blocks. all it would take is the next generation netochka to make a set of objects that are hardware accelerated, ie front ends for dsp chips, and we have the best of both worlds. and best of all, its a one-off investment.

[Linus]

hi

nice discussion with all:yep:
i dont realy now much about dsp?s and programming Software
but i think it would be realy nice to have some hardware solution (i also prefer Laptops or Rackmounted PC or Mac equipment) to run a Sequncer-programm as master of your mix (i use Emagic Logic Audio:D) with that you can trigger your VJ-Software (Resolume,VJamm,.........) that runs as "plugins" or "videosynths" with midi
and also can play back videotracks from harddisk like a logic or any other audio-hd recording programme it does with audiosignals.
than it would also nice to have a multi-i/o interface for Video so that you could route 4 in?s and 4 outs with a matrix in the software.
But i think the most important is the Power you need to doo all this things together on a single PC but maybe it could also add a option to transfer your triggersignals (midi or other) per tcp/ip (some software does this already now )
than there is some option in Logic that allows to make Jamsessions or audio-projekts over internet on a server .
but i think i could wait log on thouse things because i now how long this things has to grow in Logic :(
but when it is finished it would be also possible to imitate the cvi or other vj_hardware fx :)

regards

Linus

[MoRpH]

As for emulating the CVI, HeyVJ shoudld have MOST of the functions/FX of the fairlight emulated in software (prolly minus teh paintbox). And the FX box from the hardware FX unit which is currently being looked into will also include many fairlightesque FX and plenty of new stuff :)