BagheeraRC
1st August 2002, 05:31 PM
hiya.
i've been developing a software video mixer for mac g4's. it runs in os 9.x. it's ridiculously fast, and works with quicktime movies. it's a little bit different than a lot of what i see out there right now. it's not based on cheesy effects, or spinny-3D-fractally shapes. it's intended to be a tool for vj's who want to go beyond the digital effects, and say something with their content, and how it is presented. As such, it's more a compositional tool than anything else. there are four independent movie streams to work with, each has sequenced (speed is variable) fully customizable oscillators for contrast, brightness, saturation, and posterization(color palette reduction, a la cartoons), as well as a color adjustor. any and all streams can be laid down on four layers for composition. each layer is a sequencer, and can have any combination of any of the four streams. the layers are composited bottom-up (think photoshop), and both the compositional modes between and effects for the layers can all be sequenced independently of each other (multiple fx/composition modes switching independently on each layer, four layers each switching independently of each other). each layer also has a horizontal hold, vertical hold, and motion blur slider, all of which also have the capability to be changed by beat-driven (again, speed is variable) oscillators. There are four basic methods of altering movie playback. you can select a range within the movie file to work with, there are two breakbeat controllers, one for in points (where in the selected movie range playback starts, and when in relation to the internal sequencer the in point is triggered), and one for the speed of the movie (how fast the movie is playing, and what direction it's playing in). You can also 'scratch' with the movies.
my question to you, the vj community: what else do you think would go well with this? i'm already well into support for digitizers so you can work with live video (PCI cards & firewire), and a text generator that can read .txt files and display the contents in whatever font you want, delivered at specific, user-specified times. also in the works is full support for MIDI (it'll pick up a MIDI beat and sync to it, and you'll be able to configure it to play however you like on whatever MIDI device you have now). The whole shebang is beat driven, and there are queue lists for each video stream, and preset folders for the main file loader, so you don't have to stop playing to switch or search for movies. i have some screen real estate left, and i would feel like a real dink if i didn't ask you guys what else you think would be cool. pretty much anything you suggest can be added either as a basic control (slider, can be hooked up to it's own oscillator), or as an effect in the sequencer. if there's sufficient interest, i can throw a couple of recent screenshots up for people to look at. this thing is being designed from the ground-up to work with titanium powerbooks; you'll be able to walk in a venue with your tibook + some movie files, and jam. Please keep in mind that this is first and foremost a creative tool for the realtime alteration and composition of multiple video streams. it is built to give you a great deal of control over what you see- but you still have to decide what you want in order to get there. this is less like a plugin for winamp/itunes, and more like photoshop for video.
when i say that this thing is fast, i mean it. i'm getting full framerates, playing four movie files at the same time, with the sequencer going crazy and oscillators working on a couple of the fx for each of the streams, and fullscreen vid out to a tv/vcr.
what i got:
dual 800 g4 (tested on 400, 667, and 800 mhz tibooks)
512 RAM (app uses < 128 megs, no need to load files to RAMdisk/RAM)
nvidia 2 graphics card w/averkey 300 scan converter
peace
: : ray
i've been developing a software video mixer for mac g4's. it runs in os 9.x. it's ridiculously fast, and works with quicktime movies. it's a little bit different than a lot of what i see out there right now. it's not based on cheesy effects, or spinny-3D-fractally shapes. it's intended to be a tool for vj's who want to go beyond the digital effects, and say something with their content, and how it is presented. As such, it's more a compositional tool than anything else. there are four independent movie streams to work with, each has sequenced (speed is variable) fully customizable oscillators for contrast, brightness, saturation, and posterization(color palette reduction, a la cartoons), as well as a color adjustor. any and all streams can be laid down on four layers for composition. each layer is a sequencer, and can have any combination of any of the four streams. the layers are composited bottom-up (think photoshop), and both the compositional modes between and effects for the layers can all be sequenced independently of each other (multiple fx/composition modes switching independently on each layer, four layers each switching independently of each other). each layer also has a horizontal hold, vertical hold, and motion blur slider, all of which also have the capability to be changed by beat-driven (again, speed is variable) oscillators. There are four basic methods of altering movie playback. you can select a range within the movie file to work with, there are two breakbeat controllers, one for in points (where in the selected movie range playback starts, and when in relation to the internal sequencer the in point is triggered), and one for the speed of the movie (how fast the movie is playing, and what direction it's playing in). You can also 'scratch' with the movies.
my question to you, the vj community: what else do you think would go well with this? i'm already well into support for digitizers so you can work with live video (PCI cards & firewire), and a text generator that can read .txt files and display the contents in whatever font you want, delivered at specific, user-specified times. also in the works is full support for MIDI (it'll pick up a MIDI beat and sync to it, and you'll be able to configure it to play however you like on whatever MIDI device you have now). The whole shebang is beat driven, and there are queue lists for each video stream, and preset folders for the main file loader, so you don't have to stop playing to switch or search for movies. i have some screen real estate left, and i would feel like a real dink if i didn't ask you guys what else you think would be cool. pretty much anything you suggest can be added either as a basic control (slider, can be hooked up to it's own oscillator), or as an effect in the sequencer. if there's sufficient interest, i can throw a couple of recent screenshots up for people to look at. this thing is being designed from the ground-up to work with titanium powerbooks; you'll be able to walk in a venue with your tibook + some movie files, and jam. Please keep in mind that this is first and foremost a creative tool for the realtime alteration and composition of multiple video streams. it is built to give you a great deal of control over what you see- but you still have to decide what you want in order to get there. this is less like a plugin for winamp/itunes, and more like photoshop for video.
when i say that this thing is fast, i mean it. i'm getting full framerates, playing four movie files at the same time, with the sequencer going crazy and oscillators working on a couple of the fx for each of the streams, and fullscreen vid out to a tv/vcr.
what i got:
dual 800 g4 (tested on 400, 667, and 800 mhz tibooks)
512 RAM (app uses < 128 megs, no need to load files to RAMdisk/RAM)
nvidia 2 graphics card w/averkey 300 scan converter
peace
: : ray