Another bag of ripe, hand-picked grapefruits from the double-click universe.
Clips
Goal / world cup / soccer / pele etc are useful search terms at youtube.com to ease a smooth World Cup withdrawal transition. Youtube continues to sprawl out of control, but sites like vimeo.com offer better resolution, and in the case of jumpcut.com – even online editing of clips and photos! Firefox extension ‘Video Downloader’ let’s you download and keep videos from youtube.com, google and 60 other video hosting sites. The just launched flock.com browser is well worth a look too, for a taste of easy media-sharing and a glimpse of future online browsing.
The hugely popular digg.com, where gazillions of users rank and determine ‘news’, has added a video section. Watch that space. Chromafresh from Japan has some lovely videoclips to check out, although some are limited to stills because of bandwidth troubles.
Devil Ducky provided a very popular lyrebird video narrated by David Attenborough, a small clip voted as his best TV moment by the public on his 80th birthday. Watch the feathered sampler and be gobsmacked, as the South Australian lyrebird mimicks other birds, camera-clicks and even a chainsaw.
Video Software
VVVV(.org) is a toolkit for real time video synthesis, it’s capacities displayed splendidly by the gorgeous three dimensional experimental work of David Dessen. ( via generator x )
NY VJ + coder Vade maintains a fairly technical blog detailing his exploits with the likes of max/msp and jitter. Plenty of beautiful stills to look at, and most recently he made available a patch which exploits the capacity to find security webcams around the world using google, and then utilise these in a video application.
Useful OS X VJ software comparison Robotfunk Flowmotion 2.8, Garagecube Modul8 2.02 and Vidvox GridPro 1.02 @ Analog Recycling, using a Powerbook 17″ with 2GB RAM, and clip playback from a dual channel FW800 raid. ( Livid 2.0 would’ve been another good comparison ) At the same review site, they’ve recently ( & generously) offered a batch of 80 loops for VJs to download, as well as a variety of tutorials.
www.mxwendler.net looks promising for OSX VJ software, and are looking for beta-testers.
On a much smaller screen, London VJ Pikilipita has released free VJ software that works on a game boy advance~! Presumably for jamming along with musicians using nanoloop or LSDJ.
On the video production side, heavy duty FX and composition tool, Shake has had a price reduction from US$2800 US$500, while it gets integrated into the rest of Apple’s video production suite.
Web Video Software
There’ve been a few video blog plugins of note lately ( for the free and excellent wordpress blogging software ) which facilitate easier publishing of video on blogs, and some which enable video commenting – a worthwhile attempt to drag the pixel-makers up to the same levels of interactivity as their text cousins.
See : http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Video And http://itp.nyu.edu/research/?page_id=34 & www.joshpaul.com/blog/?p=132 for commenting explorations.
Video Hardware
Great overview of Video-capable turntables at Pixelsumo, though they missed Virtual DJ – – which is a key tool of choice at the moment for Collapsicon(.net) who is building up a live scratch video electro set.
S-Video signals can suffer / decay greatly when s-video cables are stretched across a long way across larger venues to join a computer and projector. Via a nice new live-video blog – createdigitalmotion.com, comes hint of a solution : 2 x Baluns : devices that enable S-video to be plugged in on one side, and plain ethernet cable on the other. Plug balun into computer and projector, roll length of ethernet cable to suit, and bingo – no picture distruption. ( $30ish each from Jaycar.com.au )
Buzz around the Red camera is immense within video and indie-film-making circles – presumably not only because of their domain name ( red.com ), but that the camera poised for production in early 2007 boasts a supposed 11.4M pixel resolution at up to 60 frames per second, a 35mm cine sized sensor with depth of field like film cameras and a projected cost of $17,500US which is a fraction of current cameras with much lower resolutions. Track the hype at DV guru.
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