almost there

Students over at ITP in NY, are presenting their Big Screen class, literally. 6 million pixels and 120 ft long, they build an edge blended wall that's 8160x768 and powered by 3 Mac Pros: ITP Big Screen is Big

More interestingly is the the use graphical coding language, Processing, to power all of their graphics. The use of Processing has really picked up recently. You might have run across Flight404's Solar before.

It really illustrates the great democratization of everything video. For graphics, open source is definitely taking (or taken) over. Curious to see what else Processing leads to...

Augmented reality is pretty hip word if you're a mograph/vfx hipster. What's even crazier is that people are doing it in real time. Kineme, the makers of many awesome Quartz Composer add-ons, demos the ability to digital shift reality with the digital: Kineme Quartz AR Toolkit

Technabob post an article on how two German shops, Buzzin Monkey and die agentour GmbH, created an add campaign involving a printed ad campaign. You take the magazine, head over to the interweb, and hold it up to your video camera and the site and a Mini Cooper appears attached to the magazine: Augmented reality hits newstands

What mograph guru, wannabe, jedi, hipster, or pro doesn't want some free textures? Head on over to Lost & Taken to check out a great listing of texture laden websites at their "2008 the Year of the Texture"

Create Digital Motion has a great blurb today about MomentFactory, the people behind Nine Inch Nails last tour: LEDs In the Sky...

Also make sure to check out Wired's posting from a few months ago, looking behind the scenes as well: NIN Dazzle's with Lasers, LED and Stealh

Merry Christmas from the Birmingham Apple Store Back of House team!

Many of you are probably pretty familiar with Element Lab's Versa Tube [most notibaly first recognized in the background of Coldplay's Speed of Sound video]. It's basically something to the effect of a florescent light bulb, but full of LED lights. Point is, they aren't cheap. I heard this summer from a band's manager that this church in GA took PVC pipe in 1m sections and front projected them. Gotta love ingenuity!

iDEA NATION: PVC Tubes

But this begs the question, what really impresses people?

Got a cool shout out from my buddy Josh over at his site, Creative Worship Tour, for some animated lyrics experiments I did about a year ago. Check it out now!

Been reading up lately on Display Link. It's basically video over USB and wireless USB in a semi-nutshell. An amalgam of manufacturers have jumped on board, producing everything from LG's usb-based display to things like Gefen's USB to DVI widget.

DisplayLink devices can even support internal grid/display mapping capabilities. Curious to see where this lands in live production environments. How about a Mac Mini driving 4 additional displays? Maybe?

Haven't been able to find any real testimonials of people trying to push 30 fps 480 or even 720 content down these things though.

Display Link Products

PS, my favorite, a 4.3" touchscreen display, goes for about 150 bucks. Yes, you too can turn your desk into the Space Shuttle cockpit with these things

Fudge Graphics just threw up this cool tutorial that gives you a visual guide of what layer blending modes look like... check it out HERE.

i have this weird liking for controllers. not video game controllers, but something that you could feasibly use to connect back to your comp to trigger anything. PVP, vidvox, coge, motion, quartz compositions or anything else that you can think of.

I started with an old school gravis gamepad [basically a usb ps one controller]. I then found a universal game controller to usb adapter at my local wally world for under 10 bucks which opens up a whole world of options. This allowed us to map guitar hero guitars as midi devices and almost any game controller.

An Apple Remote [for those Macs that use to come standard with them] can be purposed with a simple Quartz comp, turning it into a simple MIDI controller.

I thought I'd throw together a small list of some cool devices that can be somehow used to trigger stuff:
NES Controllers
Apple Remote
Nintendo Wiimote
Guitar Hero Axe

More 'professional' line of controllers:
Korg Nano Controllers
Behringer line of various controllers

I figured that a good dose of links is always something that people like to see. I've thrown together some of the many sets of links that I have concerning Quartz composing.

Beginning VJ App, Quartonian
Open source VJ app, Coge
Add on Modules
Quartz Projects/Forums
Quartz Wiki
Moving VJing forward
General Quartz info

For those of you who don't know, Quartz is the graphical subsystem of Mac OS X. It is made up of two parts; Quartz 2D and Quartz Compositor. In a nutshell, it's the primary core of what makes up everything visual that you see on a Mac. Now, what's really cool about it, is that many programs and end users can take of advantage of the fact that quartz modules, or patches as they're called, are built into the os that you can build upon, kind of like lego blocks. Through an install of the mac os x developer tools, you'll find yourself what is known as Quartz Composer [QC]. QC is a nodal based visual programming language that takes full advantage of the subsystem, Quartz. Now the kicker of QC is that it can do way more than the visual. As I soon found in the beginnings was that you can build Quartz projects, compositions, that respond to user input. That input can come from almost anything; audio inputs, video inputs, keyboard inputs, infrared inputs, the apple remote, video game controllers, guitar hero guitars, and MIDI among many other things. Over time, I've built some fun and useless modules and a friend of mine has built some really cool live-interactive compositions for use in the theatrical realm. Stay tuned as I begin posting my findings and trails into the world of Quartz. I'm posting all of this in hopes of finding others out there able to help make new advances in the field. For now, I leave you with an Apple Quartz tutorial and some good old Wikipedia entry.

so it's been quite some time since i've last posted anything on here. it's time to get cooking again. i've got plenty of things i want to write about and share among lots of other ideas i've got going. hopefully i'll start to get them out there before too long. stay tuned and ignore most of everything that's been posted up until now. it's olllld.

as i said last time, i've spent some time over the past couple of months researching switchers. to fill in some back story, i work for student life (sl, www.studentlife.net). it is a christian company that started in 94 by doing summer camps for middle and high schoold students and now today has progressed into doing an online-global bible study, still summer camps, global missions trips, and what is soon aproching, what we call tour. i work for the production half of sl which entails creative assistants, writers, a video aquisition team, editors, motion graphics, and then my end, the live event side. our half of production is containted by myself, the live video director, our lighting designer, and audio engineer, a master and assitant carpenter. between us in production we put on all of the production relating to the events at any number of our year round events. as we do what boils down to entertainment production on the live side, we own aproximately five sets of gear from audio, to video, to lighting, and possess our own set shop. we are one of the few, to my knowledge, "camp" organizations that owns and maintains their own stock of equipment. we have, in my opinion, and very formidable array of gear. while our gear does its job relentlessly it has begun to show it's age. i'll stick to telling my side of just the video story. we own five video rigs for live use which always output to projection. the rigs contain your basics, a switcher, monitors, playback decks, recording decks, distribution amps, intercom, cameras and projectors. sounds pretty standard. a detalied look into one of my rigs looks something like this... switcher, panasonic mx50a cameras, dvx100s or gl1s signal, all composite decks, svhs for recording [archive] playback, philips dvd player projection, [we rent dont own] pana dw5000u pretty basic, but does the job well, especially considering our audience is students. while compsite is far from great these days, it does [somehow] get the job done. same with the mx50s. for those of you who dont know the mx50a is this thing. it's a four channel compsite/s level switcher that was put out around ten years ago [i believe, let me know if someone knows the history]. we own for of them which work but it's image quality that just isn't there. our cameras, as i said, are panasonic dvx100s and canon gl1s. when they were all bought in the realm of five/six years ago and since, there really didn't exist a formidable live productin camera in that under five thousand range. so it seemed that it was either something of this sort, a canon or panasonic which only really offered composite level output then via adaption through loomed cable to get to where it was going. we have since adopted canon xh-g1s, which i'll write about more later, but are solid cameras. from quality output to feature set they were the best bet for what we do. for under 8k at the time [earlier this year] they were the only thing on the horizon which could do native 16x9 and sdi. we've purchased tweleve of them moving us past our dvx's and gl's. but this is besides the story i embarked on. i think it was something about switchers.. heading into our upcomming tour which runs from dec 27th to april 5th and then into cam which runs from about may to early august, it came time to upgrade our swithcers. as i said previously, i began researching what was out there and it is astonishing to see the options that proliferate the market today. compared to barely five years ago you could not come close to putting together a video rig outside of a corporate/production setting mostly because you just couldn't afford it and also because of the lack of options out there. these days i could repilcate the current state of one of our video rigs, on composite level with something like an edirol v4 and some misc parts for probably well under 10k possibly even 5k. it's really al in how you look at it. next time i promise to get into the swticher dilemma and post some pics of our final decision and new acquisition, as well as some pics of our upcomming spring tour. till then, //n

i've been researching broadcast/presentation switchers at work for some time now. while we do a bit of production we are at no means ready for a gv kalypso or anything. while i looked at everything noted below, i ended up focusing the majority of my research on the seemingly new crop of mid-range prosumer/professional range. my entire list boiled down to the following... midrange/broadcast gv indigo hr/kayak broadcast pix slate 1000/2100 for-a hvs500/600/100 ross synergy 100 echo lab data video 1000/900 panasonic 1000/400/mx70 edirol v440 newtek tricaster multiscreen/presentation spyder folsom/barco analog way fsr thanks to the miracle of technology the price vs feature set is getting to be affordable for a company like us to have great gear at a relatively fair price point. in my future entries i'll start following the details on my research and final choices... till then //n

last semester, back in tallahassee, i worked for a studio at florida state university, seminole productions. between my friend tyler ginter and i, we did more than an amalgam of work. from a record quantity, and in my opinion, quality, the two of us pushed each other to do work unseen by our studio and especially by myself. and in lieu of all of this backstory, tyler and i submitted to our studio head, mark rodin, most of our work to be entered into an awards festival known as the Communicator Awards. these awards are given to individuals in the field of communicatons. they offer awards to those in the area of audio, print, and video. and so just last week i was emailed by the head of our studio, mark rodin, who told us that numerous pieces of ours were awarded winings. hence my writing. three of my pieces were awarded the following: Award of Excellence [highest] - Pow Wow 2006 - Opening Title Use of Graphics/Design Award of Distinction [second] - Women’s Basketball Open 2006 Use of Special Effects/Animation Award of Distinction [second] - Pow Wow – Countdown Video 2006 Editing [the image displays only the awards of distinction awarded to the studio] you can view the full list @ communicator awards 2006 you can view all three of these pieces on my website @ my site our studio was also just recently written up in TV Technology magazine. my friend tyler was interviewed and mentioned me within it. quote... you can view the full artilce in the online edition @ tv technology online [page 44 & 45] //nick