Monthly Archive for September, 2004

Kent St week 3

Published
by
David Wolf
on September 17, 2004
in Gigs, Note to self, Tech and Vidget - Discussion
. Closed

I just got home from playing some visuals at Kent St. The show went pretty well but unfortunately the internet connection was down. This meant I could use only the clips I had on my laptop - no flickr image leeching :-). I’ve seriously gotta make/process some more clips and/or explore some more different effects because by the end of the three hour set I was thoroughly sick of all my clips.

I added a couple of new buttons to the interface so that I could have more than 25 clips at a time to choose from but they didn’t work as I had planned. Rather than getting the next 25 clips from my xml file, they got only got one extra clip and replaced the first. Luckily I was able to edit the xml, cutting the top 25 clips and pasting them back at the bottom, then re-loading the thumbnails. Whenever I load an xml file everything pauses for a good few seconds, even if the file is stored locally. I think I’ll just try to make more space for thumbnails so that next time I don’t have to reload as often.

Segmentation Fault n+1

Published
by
David Wolf
on September 15, 2004
in Gigs, Music and Video
. Closed

More gig action :-)

Segmentation Fault n+1
A night of audiovisual experiments
7:30 Tuesday 21st September, LOOP 23 Meyers Place Melbourne. Gold Coin Donation

Dale Nason
multi screen projections and noise

dpwolf (David Wolf) + TestPatN (Tim Webster)
A+V memories of buildings and places;

Dumpster Droid
reel-to-reel tape and theremin adventures

Yasmin Sabuncu
live visuals

Cahl Schroedl
industrial DJ set.

I’ve got another blog for Segmentation Fault here: http://dpwolf.net/segmentation_fault/ which will hopefully have some footage/recordings of some of the previous SegFault Gigs some time soon (for now I’ve got to cut about 300 more flyers and finalise my setup).

I think I’ll try out the newest vidget at the end of the night too.

Plug & Play @ Kent St + Vidget 3 preview

Published
by
David Wolf
on September 15, 2004
in Design, Gigs, Music, Note to self, Tech, Video and Vidget - Discussion
. Closed

For the past couple of Thursday nights I have been playing live visuals at a night called ‘Plug & Play’ at a bar called Kent St (located confusingly on Smith St in Collingwood). The night is run by two fine gentlemen named Jean Poole and Future Eater and is a nice relaxed place where each week people come to plug in their audio/video/laptop/playstation/casio devices and play. The venue also has a good broadband connection which allows for international djs/vjs to perform remotely and for me to test my latest vidgets. Version 3 is just about ready for posting here and combines the layering/mixing of clips of the first version with the photo searching and xml reading of the Flickr Viewer.

Here is a screenshot of the new drag and drop interface. The grid of images is loaded dynamically based on an xml file which means I can set the vidget up to play different content without rebuilding the entire project in LiveStage Pro. Almost everything is modular now. The ten thumbnails on the right are the results of a Flickr search for the tag ‘blue’. Each of these thumbnails is draggable to the three clip holders at the top of the screen (red, green, and blue). These refer to the three different layers of video which are output to a screen or projector. Up to three video clips or still images may be mixed/layered together.

After playing with this prototype version at Kent St last week I’m definitely going add some more space for thumbnails as I ran out of content after a while. I am also going to explore some more of the graphics modes for combining the images.

Oh yeah, I’m playing there again this week so if you’re in Melbourne come down. Its free and starts at about 8pm @ Kent St, 201 Smith St Collingwood.

Embed Tags Fixed

Published
by
David Wolf
on September 15, 2004
in Tech and Web
. 0 Comments

A few people have recently commented that my poster movies weren’t working properly. I think this was due to the fact that I was using .jpg images as the poster movies. While Safari and Firefox had no problem using the Quicktime Plugin to view the .jpgs, Internet Explorer didn’t like them. I have now replaced the .jpgs with .movs of exactly the same content so hopefully the problem has been solved.

Recycle Bins

Published
by
David Wolf
on September 8, 2004
in Video and Web
. 0 Comments

A survey of the consumption habits of my neighbours. The other day I ran around the block with my camera phone taking a quick snap of the contents of each recycle bin as I passed it on the street. I fixed the jpegs up a bit in Photoshop and opened them all in Quicktime Player, copying and pasting them into a new movie and exporting at half size (320*240).

As usual, click to load. It’s a bit bigger than my recent posts because I wanted each frame to be clear. I used the photo jpeg codec for this reason - it uses only spatial (not temporal) compression.

Once the movie is going you can click to pause and use the left and right arrows to advance frame by frame to inspect the rubbish closely :-)

Quicktime Flickr photo viewer

Published
by
David Wolf
on September 8, 2004
in Design, Tech, Vidget - Download and Web
. 6 Comments

Click image to load in Quicktime Player (it seems to be a little funky in a browser)

This is a little Quicktime movie that lets you view photos from Flickr, a photo sharing and social networking site. When users upload their images they associate them with tags, so a picture of a tree may have the tags ‘tree’, ‘green’, ‘eucalyptus’ etc. The entire database of photos is searchable by tag, by author, by series and other organisations. Each of these has a RSS or ATOM feed associated with it. This is what I am using here to access the 10 most recent uploads for a given tag.

To search the site and view the photos, just type a tag, say “cow” (no quotes) into the small white text field and press return. If you press return without entering any text you get the 10 most recent uploads from any category. Once the thumbnails load you can click to view at a larger size on the right.

The movie uses Quicktime’s ability to read and parse XML files such as RSS feeds and access files from the network.

Source files and more detailed explanation soon…

Video Comments

Published
by
David Wolf
on September 3, 2004
in Video and Web
. 0 Comments

Andreas at solitude.dk has set up a system on his videoblog whereby anyone can leave video comments which are added to the end of his video piece. I’ll have to find out exactly how it works but it Adrian says it is a combination of scripts which generate a SMIL file with Quicktime content.

You can find it here.

I just added a comment and it worked SO easily! The theme is confessions so I made a quick voyeuristic noir piece with my phone camera and some of my friend Elaine’s music on the stereo. Check it out as part of the video comment thread, or below.

[update- just as I posted this my neighbour actually came into the room I was filming and started singing in the shower!]

PAGEot and Lillipot

Published
by
David Wolf
on September 2, 2004
in Tech
. 0 Comments

I just found these links on the Quicktime Talk discussion list. I haven’t had a chance to try them out yet but they look very handy.

PAGEot Is a freeware application for Mac OS X, OS 9, and Windows, which generates Quicktime embed HTML code. It looks a bit like QT HTML which I mentioned previously. Its good to see PAGEot is actively being developed and is cross platform friendly.

Lillipot is an OS X application which converts ‘reference’ Quicktime movies to ‘flattened’ files for posting online. Some applications such as iMovie will save a small QT file which refers to other movies for its content. This saves space but when it comes to posting online these reference files break. Lilipot allows you to drag and drop movies onto the application, flatten them and set them up for ‘fast-start’ online delivery.

Both of these applications are hosted on a French Quicktime site: http://www.qtbridge.com/ which has a number of interesting links I will check out soon.

Plug & Play Thursday September 2

Published
by
David Wolf
on September 1, 2004
in Gigs and Video
. 0 Comments

::::::::PLUG & PLAY
Thu Sep 2 >>

2 players, 1 x playstation with controller >> fed into >> 1 miniDV camera >> fed into 1 lappy
= 1 xLive Audio & Video : Tony Hawk Playstation Remix Challenge!!

Watch 2 players sweat it out on the big screen - even as their video gets remixed live
and sound mashed…
and while they are wearing medieval armour!! ( dont ask us why )
……………………. ……………………………. ………………. ………
……………………………………………… ……
another good reason to come along?
++We’ll again be passing the hat around to help pay
Future Eater’s Insurance Excess Fee for his stolen laptop!
……………………. ……………………………. ………………. ………
……………………………………………… ……
Guest Pixelist this week: Dpwolf ( VJing with custom-made app + utilising remote online database images )

    “““““ Other pixels & in between_sounds : Jean P00le

 
-__-_-____}}–_ -__ -__-_-____
-__-__& PLUG IN YOUR AVs!  (BYO sound & video tools)
       ;;; pleaz contact : oz_hq@micromusic.net
                                     thursdays 20:00 –> 23:00 : 201 Smith Street, Fitzroy
             ——- ,,,,, .. ,.,,,,.. ,,,.,——-,,,,…,,.
—–,,..,,..——–,,..——–