Went pretty well I’d say. Not that it’s really my call to make :) Seemed rather short despite my lack of fore­sight result­ing in me stand­ing for the dura­tion (I for­got to get a chair and then there were peo­ple in the room and chairs were too far away. Ones with arm­rests weren’t an option because they’re incon­ve­nient). Stand­ing was, how­ever, a neces­sity. Video was com­posed largely from ana­logue loops, with every­thing ulti­mately run­ning through effecTV. It did work amaz­ingly well (IMO) but it was a bit of a pain not to be able to use com­pos­ite cap­ture, which would have meant a big­ger cam­era not so con­strained by a USB lead. Just qui­etly, my web­cam kicks arse. Like, with plas­tic explo­sives or some­thing. It’s great even in low light! Obvi­ously it drops off into the nether-regions, but still… all-round goodness.

The grain wasn’t really a prob­lem any­way, because most of the vision was inten­tion­ally grungy/the input was only a seed for fur­ther dig­i­tal gen­e­sis, so that was cool. I’ve got to get the com­pos­ite input for this com­puter work­ing before I do another one of these things or get a real cap­ture card, though, because it’s a pain hav­ing only one cam­era. Usu­ally I’d flick it around to a light source bright enough that every­thing would flare out and then repo, or switch to a heav­ily dis­torted effect, or slide my fin­ger over it (it’s a web­cam, okay?) to black. The vision mixer didn’t get a work­out because I couldn’t get TV-out work­ing prop­erly in time (mostly because effecTV’s fullscreen mode did weird things to sync on com­pos­ite out­puts, but hey, VGA worked).

I’ve really got to learn how to use Pure­Data before next time, too. It looks so incred­i­bly pow­er­ful, wow. I don’t under­stand where it out­puts sources/runs, though. Looks great for rout­ing and fil­ter­ing stuff to the hilt, but where that all ends up is beyond me! Again, hope­fully before next time.

It just occurred to me that pretty much every cam­era with IEEE1394 on the planet can be used as a V4L source. D’oh. Maybe I should finally buy a real cam­era instead of some bor­ing cap­ture hard­ware. Cap­ture hard­ware doesn’t NEED to be bor­ing, if you’re in a Win­dows envi­ron­ment and need a device that does real-time effects… but I’m not $2500 enthu­si­as­tic about all this just yet. And prob­a­bly won’t be until it starts to have some abstract kind of earn­ing poten­tial… which I’m pretty okay with­out, but nev­er­the­less, it’s dif­fi­cult to jus­tify that going into a hole of depreciation.

So… for next time, more cam­eras mixed (with vision mixer) into cap­ture device, more cam­eras using FireWire, more effects custom-designed using Pure­Data, and dig­i­tal vision mix­ing with FreeJ. I’m happy with VGA out­put because you’re push­ing native res­o­lu­tion to the pro­jec­tor that way. I’m also not too con­cerned about PC resources/performance. Tonight I’d say it was online for 3.5 hours with­out a glitch (with the excep­tion of a kick-out 10 min­utes in, and I was still par­tially set­ting up and wasn’t par­tic­u­larly in the mid­dle of any­thing), run­ning from a USB source. There used to be a time when that would just not have been pos­si­ble with con­sumer gear (the cam­era cost about $90 – 110, which means it’s a rather-decent web­cam. Prob­a­bly, at this stage, one of the more expen­sive com­po­nents of my setup!)

Oh, and I didn’t get to record any of the per­for­mance, sorry. Gem recorded another person’s per­for­mance for me ear­lier in the evening, but I’m too tired to share that right now… prob­a­bly tomor­row, before Selo comes to my house and kicks my dog… err I mean camera’s SD card mem­ory. I gotta do it before this month ends, because I’m now hilar­i­ously over quota. It’s got to be all because uploads count, seri­ously! I’ve been doing nearly 1GB a month to Flickr alone. Any­way. Stop­ping ram­bling and start­ing sleeping.

Tags: capture device, capture hardware, chair, Cru, pain, real-time effects, Windows