Live Video Features

Replies

Thorrific July 18, 2007 at 6:32am

I love to use the live video features. Anything more you can do is great. I tried it out on my friend's huge, fat MacPro with lots of RAM and it ran really fast! I like it on my old dual 450hz G4 too, but seeing it work on my pal's MacPro made me want one really bad. I like to make paint presets that use the background texture live video feature and then paint the video, it is so cool. Live video straight into Evolver is so awesome too! I don't know enough technically to suggest features, but please please if you can do some more stuff that uses live video!
Donna Kuhn July 18, 2007 at 11:33am

before i saw this post yesterday i was going to ask you to possibly provide more info on how to use live video.(mainly in sa, how to use it besides the background texture.) using it in msg is very exciting. i am filming trees outside (painted trees are amazing) and shooting dance with some semi-abstract presets so it doesnt matter if i'm in my pajamas and the livingroom is messy. i have better luck with the dv camera, i have an old webcam (a mac without an isight) and am having some trouble finding webcams for mac os x. there are bizarre things that happen to the interface, different sized movies all over the place (movies flashing) and for awhile my canvas was crooked. i mostly use the live video background texture and sometimes have to put it in isight mode to get it to play. sometimes the video stops playing when i start to draw. i used a wacom tablet to avoid pushing the action button. i can't think of new features. i'd like to know what the setting in file "video capture" is for. i would love it if msg evolver had the canvas to image setting that sa has. as thor said, painting the video texture is pretty compelling now that i am working backwards and using a wacom tablet and learning the paint synthesizer. i find it easier to import movie background texture brushes than movie brushes (they crash.) i've been shooting the tv to test out the different msg presets and my daughter had fun interactively using the animating presets that turned her colors and did other things geometrically.
- Synthetik > Donna Kuhn July 18, 2007 at 11:56am
  
  iSight source mode to capture video frames as the source image and the live video background texture are really the 2 different uses of live video in shipping Studio Artist right now. We're looking to expand the functionality in the next release.
  
  It's hard for us to test against all the different webcam permutations. Our live video implementation depends on Quicktime support being there for the particular device, which is up to the developer of the particular webcam. You would want to make sure you had the latest driver software for a particular webcam installed, and that could change depending on what machine and operating system version you are running.
  
  The setting under file allows you to record a live video capture command in a PASeq, or to do a single capture using the menu command as opposed to clicking in the source area. I've generated elapsed time movies where a frame is taken every minute for example by building a PASeq that does something time consuming to act as the time delay and then captures a video frame as the last step in the PASeq. you start a movie stream and then generate the PASeq animation into the movie stream.
  
  If you have any more information on your movie brush crash, please email techsupport@synthetik.com about it. We're not aware of any problems with movie brushes and use them extensively here. In general, the movie brush features were designed to work with small brush sizes and limited time length movies. So maybe you are running into problems using large quicktime files and running into memory limitations when Studio Artist tries to store the entire movie in ram if the preset is setup to cache the entire movie before drawing.
  - Michael Theodore > Synthetik July 18, 2007 at 2:46pm
    
    I haven't worked with the live video possiblities in SA, and won't be able to for a couple of weeks. However, I have done a fair amount of performances with live video (mostly using Jitter). Stuff that I've found helpful in doing live video shows:
    
    1) having a control interface on the computer while sending images full screen to the projector
    2) having multiple modules with different looks, and the ability to switch between them
    3) the ability to turn off modules that are not in use (to save cpu juice)
    4) the abilty to have multiple video streams and fade between them (so that switching between effects doesn't have to be a hard jump)
    
    I'm not sure which of those things are implemented in SA (could be all of them), but in any case, I've found all of those things helpful.
keith Ingersoll July 19, 2007 at 12:29am

I have a firewire video camera in addition a built in web camera on my iMac. Will there be support for firewire, is there now?
- Synthetik > keith Ingersoll July 19, 2007 at 9:25am
  
  There is support for firewire cameras now in Studio Artist 3.5 for live video input. Either Apple or the camera manufacturer has to provide the Quicktime driver for the camera. If that is there on the machine then it will work. We tend to test here using an iSight camera, but we have lots of users working with the live video feature using a firewire video camera.
- Synthetik > keith Ingersoll July 19, 2007 at 10:18am
  
  There's a Live Video Paint category in the 3.0 Collection that shows off a few simple uses of Live Video Background Textures.
  
  The iSight source mode is pretty straightforward. When you switch to it in the source area, if you have a camera hooked up then you should start seeing a live video display in the source area. When you click on it then you capture a frame. There is a time lag between when you click and when the capture takes place.
  
  There is a bug on some intel machines where the live video display in the iSight source area does not live update during the preview part. You can still do the frame captures, but you won't see the live display preview update prior to the actual capture.
  
  There is also a Video Capture menu under the main FIle menu and you can capture to the source or the screen by running the appropriate menu.
  
  The source capture will happen at the pixel dimensions of the source image you were using prior to entering iSight mode or doing the menu source video capture. The canvas capture will happen at the pixel dimensions of the current layer. Both of those menu operations can be recorded in a PASeq, so you can build some interesting PASeqs this way.
  
  Using live video in MSG Evolver is pretty straight forward. You go to the Process ; temporal Animation Preview main menu and you can turn on Live Video SOurce there. Then when you 'Run a Current Animation' the live video will stream in as the source.
  - Donna Kuhn > Synthetik July 20, 2007 at 8:17am
    
    could you give a little more detail on how to use live video in a paseq? it's an intriguing idea but i can't really imagine how you would do it.
    
    thanks,
    
    donna
    - Synthetik > Donna Kuhn July 20, 2007 at 8:35am
      
      Well, with the live video background texture paint effects, the video images stream into the paint itself. You can use it in different ways, as a texture source for the paint, or i've done kaleidoscopic or mosaic kinds of effects with it. The LIve Video presets show off a few simple examples of this.
      
      If you record a video capture in a PASeq, then you can either use the captured frame as the source image for painting for the rest of the PASeq or you can capture it into the canvas and then run additional effects on it there. In some sense its going to come out like a time elapse film, since the PASeq will capture a frame and then process it for a certain amount of time, then write out the canvas (if it's being run as an animation into a movie stream), then the cycle starts again. Depending on what you do in the rest of the PASeq it might run pretty fast through a cycle or a lot slower.
      
      I made a film once where i used one really long paint step to act as a timer (it took a minute to process). I then put the capture step after this. So i was able to make a time elapse movie where a frame was captured once a minute.
      - Donna Kuhn > Synthetik July 21, 2007 at 12:31pm
        
        i've been doing live video all day and am finding the msg to be less complicated. yet i like the fact that in sa in a movie stream you cant stop and change effects and fiddle around and it doesn't effect the movie. when i tried this in msg it would stop the movie and i would have to remember to generate a new movie. i'd like some combination of the two but am not sure whether this exists already. what i mean is i like the color and abstraction and indep. resolution aspects of msg. i noticed a category called msg paint and a setting in macro edit called make msg paint. is there a way to get msg effects to paint with in live video? i know there is msg in the paint brush load but i don't see how to get that in live video. i found some of what i was looking for in the the modulation of paint fill set up, such as hue saturation and if i wasn't hallucinating from exhaustion i believe i was painting live video into my source image at one point?