About time I posted anything here. Poplar catkins are open until mid-June in Moscow.
VDMX New Beta b0.4
Posted by on June 19th, 2007 in vdmx and visual · 2 CommentsThe guys at Vidvox have just released a new public beta of VDMX5. The changes since the last beta are numerous, and while you could (and actually should) browse through the release notes, here’s a brief overview of what’s new and what’s hot (at least for me — your favourite features might be different).
First big feature that is, perhaps, the most awaited by the community is multiple live video input. Yes it’s multiple (though according to Vidvox guys you’ll have a hard time using multiple inputs simultaneously in a sensible way without making use of external hardware — that’s due to Apple’s drivers). If you’re like me and you use VDMX on a Mac portable, you’ll be playing with the built-in iSight in a matter of seconds, just like this:
VDMX Tutorial
Posted by on April 27th, 2007 in live, tutorial, vdmx and visual · 14 CommentsEdit: Vidvox team took their time to browse this tutorial and pointed out several things that might be improved, so the text has been slightly updated to reflect the suggested additions and corrections.
Ok, so VDMX.
VDMX5 is Mac only, currently in beta and already on sale. The demo is fully functional but save-disabled. The documentation is half-done, but what’s already there is very thorough — most of possible questions are covered, and Vidvox people are quite willing to respond to every reasonable request you might come with. That, however, doesn’t answer the question of how to work with VDMX. And that is because (and Vidvox team likes to point that out) VDMX5 isn’t a VJ tool of sorts, it’s more of a framework for creating visual tools that you want — you might set up once and reuse that setup every now and then, or you might build your dream VJ app every time you need something different (and fine-tune it for the specific tasks you come across). But enough of this rant.
Meet the dragon.
This is what it looks like when you initialize it. If you click on the screencap, you’ll see a bigger version with captions of what’s what. Continue reading “VDMX Tutorial”
First live
Posted by on April 25th, 2007 in live, music and sound · 2 CommentsA few weeks ago I flew to Moscow to play my first video set supporting Dasha Veliko’s naive and wonderful live show.
Photo © parachutgirl.
Nothing amazing, several chopped-up and post-processed Windy Tales sequences, layered and mixed with some visuals drawn by my friend Toxity. The response, however, was quite positive — the same day I bought my VDMX5 license and started to figure out what’s what inside Quartz Composer.
And so this blog was started — most of VJ blogs are written by industry veterans showing tons of experience and awesome stuff, I have some strong visual design and Flash animation background so I hope to hop on the live-visuals bandwagon and tell you exactly what I’m doing at the same time. That means tutorials, downloads and published sources (under Creative Commons license or something like that).
Next stop: VDMX explained.
Pad experts (2)
Posted by on April 25th, 2007 in audiomulch, generative, iterative, music and sound · 1 CommentTwo examples of pad experts usage:
aienn — ynmk (2002) [8.5Mb]
aienn — vesna (pad experts version, 2004) [3Mb]
Pad experts
Posted by on April 25th, 2007 in audiomulch, generative, iterative and sound · 1 CommentI’ve been doing ambient stuff for seven years now. Sometimes people ask how do I do that. Well, the process is quite simple — most of time I pick some other music that I wrote before and pulverize it into clouds. Then I rearrange those clouds in order for the inner musical logic to reappear, and then it’s done. Sometimes I score certain musical pieces just for the sake of pulverizing them — I guess it’s okay as long as you retain the overall musical structure and feel.
The process of pulverizing is done via granular synthesis, a resynthesis algorhythm that manupulates overlapped, pitch-shifted and delayed microparticles of incoming sound. And for that I use Audiomulch by Ross Bencina, a wonderful piece of Windows software for sound mangling and performance. It’s a minor pain in the ass since I switched to Apple hardware so I have to reboot my MacBook Pro to BootCamp every now and then, but Audiomulch is great enough to justify all these inconveniences. The Granulator contraption bundled with Audiomulch is one of the best granulators realised in software.
All these years I’m using a small bunch of Granulator presets for Audiomulch:
Pad experts [16kb, Audiomulch 1.0 required]
