Video

{#image261}I have been using the JVC Everio GZMC500, one of the first hard drive based video cameras with a decent price tag and ok features, for more than half a year and my general impressions are very positive. Positive things: No tapes!!! 3CCD, excellent for recording in dark concert/lecture halls Very small and handy Negative things: No microphone/line input (this was a major drawback with this model, but luckily the built-in stereo microphone is not too bad…) Storing files in an MPEG-2 format which is probably good for writing directly to DVD, but a hazzle to work with on a computer (at least Macs) since they have to be re-encoded to something that is more easily playable in QuickTime....

My paper entitled “Using motiongrams in the study of musical gestures” was accepted to ICMC 06 in New Orleans. The abstract is: Navigating through hours of video material is often time-consuming, and it is similarly difficult to create good visualization of musical gestures in such a material. Traditional displays of time-sampled video frames are not particularly useful when studying single-shot studio recordings, since they present a series of still images and very little movement related information....

Daniel Rozin has made some Wooden Mirrorsfrom various materials. Any person standing in front of one of these pieces is instantly reflected on its surface. The mechanical mirrors all have video cameras, motors and computers on board and produce a soothing sound as the viewer interacts with them.

{.imagelink}I’m participating in a workshop in Bergen, and got to meet Gisle Frøysland who is developing MøB, a software for installations and realtime manipulation of digital media in GNU/Linux-based networks. I am looking forward to seeing it in action during the course of the workshop.

The Fogscreen is a new invention which makes objects seem to appear and move in thin air! It is a screen you can walk through! The FogScreen is created by using a suspended fog generating device, there is no frame around the screen. The installation is easy: just replace the conventional screen with FogScreen. You don´t need to change anything else - it works with standard video projectors.The fog we are using is dry, so it doesn’t make you wet even if you stay under the FogScreen device for a long time....

sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! is a Realtime-Mind-Music-Video-Re-De-Construction-Machine. It is a conceptual software which makes it possible to work with samples in a completely new way by making them available in a manner that does justice to their nature as concrete musical memories.

{#p95 .imagelink}dbv is a customizable vj tool built with Max/MSP/Jitter. Simple, but with some nice implementation details. I particularly like the way it displays video thumbnails, and adds extra pages if you have more videos than it is space for in the preview pane.

{#p94 .imagelink}traer.physics is a particle system physics engine for the Processing video programming environment. The user community of Processing seems to be growing rapidly these days, and from my few tests of the language it seems to be stable and efficient. Would be interesting to see if it is possible to combine Processing with Max/MSP/Jitter. OSC is one option, but it would be nice if someone made a wrapper so that it could be possible to run Processing from a Max object....

A short overview of various video annotation software: - Anvil by Michael Kipp is a java-based program for storing several layers of annotations, like a text sequencer. Can only use avi files. Intended for gesture research (understood as gestures used when talking). - Transana from University of Wisconsin, Madison, is developed mainly as a tool for transcribing and describing video and audio content. Seems like it is mainly intended for behavioural studies....

I have been struggling with figuring out the easiest way of converting MPEG-2 .MOD files coming out of a JVC Everio HD camera to something else, and finally found a good solution in Squared 5 - MPEG Streamclip which allows for converting these files to more or less all codecs that are available on the system. It is also a good idea to rename the .MOD files to .M2V or ....