Monday, December 26, 2005

Looking for more VT writers


The current pool o' VT posters has gotten quiet, and I am stretched pretty thin between work, my blog, and my drinking habit (kidding). So I'm looking for new potential Video Thing writers. Drop me a line about why you think you'd be a good candidate and I'll set you up an account.

Sunday, December 25, 2005

Sony RDR-AX75 DVR Dumps PSP Compatible Video - Gizmodo

Sony releases an H.264 recorder that will send to the psp:
Link
and another Link
Thanks DVD Guy!

Thursday, December 22, 2005

ATI adding H.264 acceleration to Radeon cards

Looks like existing Radeon cards will get the acceleration added on via software (or a firmware update?)
Link
Thanks DVDGuy!

Friday, December 16, 2005

Red is real.

Mike dishes out the scoop on the new RED HD cameras over on HD for Indies.

Congress tries to plug the analog hole

Today Via Boing Boing:

The government is proposing that devices (consumer electronics, computers, software) manufactured after a certain date respond to a copy-protection signal or watermark in a digital video stream, and pass along that signal when converting the video to analog. The same goes for analog video streams, to pass on the protection to the digital video outputs.

The technology Congress is proposing (VEIL) is derived from one that originated with assorted interactive Batman toys that allowed the toys to respond to Batman television shows or videos. How cool—at least for toys.

The government wants your future TV, TiVo, computer, cell phone, Final Cut Pro, (input your favorite analog signal viewing / converting device here) to respond to the Bat Signal.

Link

Wednesday, November 30, 2005

H.264 DVD players

Looks like the first wave of H.264 dvd players are coming out of Asia. Some of these are hybrid divx/h.264/dvd players. One is an h.264 PVR Recorder.
Link
Thanks DVDGuy!

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Retro Thing: Fisher-Price PXL 2000 - Wickedly Lo-Fi Home Video

Our sister site Retro Thing has a nice post today about one of our favorite pieces of lost tech- the venerable PXL 2000.

Saturday, November 26, 2005

HD For Indies - Holographic discs in the works

From Mike's blog-
The holographic disk promises to retail for $100, and by 2010, it will have capacity of 1.6TB each. That's pretty inexpensive," said Ron Tarasoff, vice president of broadcast technology and engineering at Turner Entertainment. "Even this first version can store 300GB per disk, and it has 160MB/sec. data throughput rates. That's burning. Then combine it with random access, and it's the best of all worlds.

Link

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Scott Fisher: PXL THIS 15, 11/19

PXL THIS 15, the 15th annual film festival featuring the Fisher Price PXL 2000 toy video camera premieres Saturday, Nov 19, 2 different shows 7 & 9pm at Sponto Gallery, 7 Dudley Ave, Venice, 310-306-7330, free admission. For more info, please visit: www.indiespace.com/pxlthis and www.81x.com/7dudley/cinema


Link

Saturday, November 05, 2005

Vintage Television Equipment


Here's a great dirt-style page of vintage television equipment and cameras collected by Mr. Chuck Pharis. Some amazing looking old cameras in here & totally arcane equipment.

Friday, November 04, 2005

Cool Hunting: Nokia N92


Phone/Camera/TV/Laser gun?
Link

Thursday, November 03, 2005

MPEG Streamclip 1.5

MPEG Streamclip 1.5 is now available. Converts Mpeg 1/2/4 files to QuickTime .mov's (incuding Apple's H.264). Muxes and demuxes mpeg and m2v. Since it uses Apple's H.264 it is considerably faster than Handbrake at encoding. This with MactheRipper is the best solution for archiving DVD's or converting them to play on iPods or in iTunes.
Thanks DVDGuy!

Saturday, October 22, 2005

Siggraph - Khronos Projector


Link
Interactive 4d video weirdness from Siggraph.
Thanks Nick

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

SWEET JESUS

Video ipod.


Daring Fireball weighs in on the product announcements. No firewire on the iPod is kind of a bummer, but frontrow does definitely make it look like we're in for some kind of TV connectivity, not from the ipod, which will only play 320x240, but from the computer itself. By all accounts, the small video looks awesome on the ipod- and that's the screen it's intended for once it's been formatted, the tv connectivity is more for photos. The ipod is the delivery device in this case, and video podcasting seems to be the big use for it... downloading daily shows and watching them on the subway. I've already noticed that the Cinema Minema podcasts I'm subscribed to in iTunes have already farmed out some video clips to my library. I expect HD connectivity from Macs to televisions to be coming next. The Front Row interface they've got in the new iMac begs it. And the airport express is too good a precedent not to expect some wireless video in the future.

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

The first Videoclip-sampleplayer with Midi



Found Via our sister-site Music Thing (who in turn got it off Module Records), the MFB VJ is a mini video sampler that holds 28 four-second video clips, with a crossfader and some onboard effects.

Saturday, October 01, 2005

3D Monitor


From FutureFeeder:
LightSpace claims its DepthCube is the world's first solid-state volumetric 3D display capable of 3-dimensional projections without any headgear or moving parts. The display runs on a stack of 20 liquid crystal shutters synchronized with a video projector (50Hz refresh rate) all packed in a TV set box circa 1980.

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Using Play-Doh as an interface to control digital media

Brendan Dawes is working on an digital media interface that involves adding and subtracting wads of play-doh to controll play speed.
As I twist the Play-Doh and take bits away, the film reacts accordingly in real-time. Add too much Play-Doh and the film rapidly speeds up. An intimate connection is made between the user and the media. Every action has a reaction in the digital space. No scary buttons to press. No instructions to read. It's just Play-Doh.

Link
Found Via Pasta and Vinegar

macosxhints - Record any video stream to disk using VLC

Link

Thursday, September 15, 2005

MK12 Guided By Voices Video

MK12 convinces me, once again, that not only are they mad geniuses, they are the cream 'o the crop. Guided By Voices Video

They avoid contrived 3d elements, have amazing transitions, and overall brilliant design. I especially like the 'print' look applied to the shots. These guys are getting better at telling stories, too.

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Home Movie Night

Video Thing'er Bohus Blahut has started a video blog of his own: Home Movie Night. Looks great so far!

Every week we will feature a different home movie taken from 8mm, super 8, or 16mm film. Every film we share has been shot by amateurs, and many never have been seen by more than a few people.

Link

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

$80 camcorder for kids - Engadget - www.engadget.com


Vidster is Mattel's shot at the video-for-kids market, and I'll be interested to see if anybody comes up with any innovative hacks for it. It shoots at 320 x 240 resolution at 15 fps and connects to a PC via USB (Mattel included some custom editing software in the package). It's got 32mb of memory on board but it's expandable to 512. Not much more impressive than my phone, really.. but ever since the Pixelvision I am a sucker for this kind of stuff.

Thanks Peter!

Saturday, September 10, 2005

DeCorp: FlatWire / Flat Wire Video Cable Product Listing and Pictures

Everybody has already probably seen these on BoingBoing, but they're still awesome enough to post again, Flat, paint over video cables fow walls, including component video connections. Practically invisible without having to stick holes in your walls.

Saturday, September 03, 2005

3D HDTV, no glasses required - Engadget

From Engadget:
Newsight Corporation has developed a technique for displaying HDTV in 3D without the need for wearing special glasses.
The technique uses software processing to pass HD video streams through a converter chip that creates eight stereo
views on-the-fly. When a filter is applied to project each of the eight views in a slightly different direction on an
LCD monitor, the human eye picks up the different scenes and composites them into a coherent three-dimensional view.

Link

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Memory Stick Pro Duo Video Recorder

The Memory Stick Pro recorder is an analog to digital video converter that records movies and TV shows straight to your Memory Stick Pro Duo, for playback on PSP

Link
Found Via BoingBoing

Sunday, August 28, 2005

VinylVideo

Bohus writes:
There is actually a long history of video stored on vinyl. Not too long ago the earliest recordings of some of Britain's earliest broadcasting experiments (done by Baird)on acetate. These were digitized and restored on the internet someplace.

[The video turntable in last post -w] isn't the same (and is wickedly cool I should mention) but I thought that you guys might be interested. Also you might want to check out a current take on similar technology. Hit www.vinylvideo.com to learn more.

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Video Turntable

From We Make Money Not Art:
Video Turntable, by miyakodub, is a machine that appears to be very similar to a regular turntable. You put a disc on it, the disc rotates, and then the system picks up sound that's encoded on the disc. But Video Turntable uses a webcam instead of a phonograph needle, transparent discs with color patterns instead of traditional black discs with grooves, and a digital computer vision system instead of analog circuits to decode and produce sound.Multiple transparent discs can be stacked, creating different combinations of colors and thereby sound. The system can recognize five colors: black, red, yellow, blue, and green. Depending on which area colors appear in a webcam's view, the system controls pitch, pan, volume, delay, etc. You can also draw color patterns on a disk by yourself and use it to play unique sound patterns.

Link
Video

Friday, August 19, 2005

OnSuper8

Giles Perkins writes:

It's a video thing in the widest sense of the word -

Super 8 film is alive and kicking and we've set up www.onsuper8.org to provide the latest news, views and information for those using the little film but editing digitally. Why not combine those luscious celluloid images with the ease of DV editing? Sounds like the best of both worlds to me!

Thursday, August 11, 2005

processing LIVE : using processing and powermates as a vj tool



This guy uses custom software built in Processing, controlled by a series of Griffin Powermates to VJ, in this case for the band Bitshifter.

Link
Found Via Pixelsumo

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Roger's 3D Adventures

Roger's 3D Adventures is a blog about 3D video.

Media Mirror


The Media Mirror is an interactive video installation, in which 200+ channels of live cable television are continuously arranged in real-time to form a mosaic representation of the person that stands in front of it.

Link
Thanks Skye!

Saturday, August 06, 2005

RAREVISION - Slo motion on 60i camcorders

Via the Slo-Mo video festival's how to page: A cool article about how to get good slow motion with camcorders that shoot 60i, by Thomas Worth.

Camera Phone video festival

organgrindermedia.com is hosting a phonecam video competition in October. Videos must be 3 minutes long and originate on a phone. External sound sources can be used, and multiple phones can be employed. No word on whether or not you can do any finishing effects on the footage in an editor, but if you can't it's a pretty gray area since they require you to upconvert the footage to SD- you have to submit your completed short as a DVD. Nokia has a similar competition going (originally it was just normal shorts shot with phones in mind as the final output, now it includes shorts actually shot on phones), but I may enter this one instead, since it seems less intimidating to me for some reason. I've been playing with an idea for a longer piece that would use both phone footage and SD footage cut together, and this may be a good starting point for the phonecam portion of it.

Again, this makes me think about the possibility of a video thing festival... maybe something that is just a compilation of our stuff on a DVD, rather than a laborious actual festival. Talk amongst yourselves.

HD for indies: The HD Analog Shutout - no HD on your HDTV

I don't know if Mike will get a chance to recap his latest HD for Indies post here, so I'm going to go ahead and link to it for him, it's worth reading in full if you've got the time. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Movies don't want to be trapped in freaky, proprietary, locked up formats.

It looks like the Hollywood studios are requiring use of an HDMI connector with HDCP (hardware device copy protection) for high definition video content on next generation formats, HD DVD and Blu Ray. [...]
So what does this mean? Imagine you spent $2000-$5000 on an HDTV a couple of years ago. You're into all this new tech, you love it. So HD DVD and Blu Ray discs actually ship, and you plunk down $500-$1000 for one of the first players (assuming you're OK buying into one of two competing standards) and you take it home and pop it in your player. Woops, your set lacks HDMI with HDCP, you only have HD component analog connections. Even though they work with all of your other high definition gear, the player will quietly downsample your HD signal to standard definition. You watch the movie, and frankly, it doesn't look any better than your regular DVDs that play on your kids' $50 player. Box it up and return it, you don't think it's worth it. You could be watching a regular DVD on a $50 player on a $300-$800 TV and it would look pretty much just as good...

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Korg Kaptivator


The Kaptivator is a drum-machine style control surface for vj's that will work off a live dv feed or clips. It does audio level and bpm detection so that you can automate some of the mixing to music.
link
Thanks, Skye

Saturday, July 30, 2005

Experimental video creation for children

Here's an interesting article over at we-make-money-not-art about an experimental multiuser video station for kids that uses miniature video cameras and tokens with embedded RFID tags to hold the media.

Demonstration movie (requires QuickTime 7)

Friday, July 22, 2005

G-Play



The G-Play is a tiny 100gb drive that will store ripped images of DVD's, DivX files, and various sundry audio and image formats, and then play them out to your a/v hardware over composite, vga or analog stereo connections. It's complete with a tiny remote. Pretty awesome, although the model I saw does not play H.264 (you could fit about 20 DVD images on the G-Play. If it played H.264 you could fit a hundred movies at about the same quality). The_DVD_Guy got one of these, and according to him, the company that makes the decoder chip on this thing has started making H.264 player chips, so.... next model?
Personally, I'm still holding out for a video iPod, but this is getting pretty close to the target, the capacity pretty much biff-whomps anything similar in price/size on the market.

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

DIY 35mm adapters for shooting DV with cinematic depth of field



I've been meaning to write something about this for a while, but fortunately just found a site with a better explanation than I could probably manage, and also instructions to build the thing: DOF Machine

Basically the principle is that you use a 35mm lens to project an image onto a ground glass, and then shoot that image on DV. This way you get the cinematic shallow depth of focus that DV cannot usually achieve due to the small size of the CCD.

There are many people online who've built devices to do this, varying from professional-looking machined boxes, to gaffer-taped Heath Robinson contraptions involving CD-R cakeboxes and spinning clear CDs, to amazing conglomerations of filter rings and adapters:



Here's a page with info on the above contraption and some stills of the impressive results: http://www.enormousapparatus.com/35adapter.htm

There are also commercially avaliable adapters such as the Micro35

The hub of discussion about such DIY adaptors is the dvinfo.net Alternative Imaging Methods forum (which also contains lots of other stuff possibly of interest to us video experimentalists such as home made HD cameras!)

There are various complications and drawbacks of course, but it seems pretty straightforward to build one of these adaptors. Definitely something I'll have to experiment with some time.

Friday, June 24, 2005

Video Keytar



This is so uber-dorky and utterly video thing I can't believe I missed it before:
Introducing the RGB guitar solo. Viditar is Livid's pioneering custom made video instrument for real-time video expression and performance. Viditar's integrated hardware and software takes video performance away from the computer and onto the stage. Generate high quality real-time video performances by combining video triggering, scratching, source mixing, and live camera manipulation, to give you total control over hundreds of effects and thousands of media files.

Link
Evidently they custom build these things, so you probably have to pay big bucks for the privelage of getting made fun of for wearing one. Livid does make a tabletop video controller called the tactic that gets big points for being partially made of wood.

Thanks to Skye for initially sending me a link to the Tactic

z-agon


Each face of this cubic movie player is a high-resolution and rimless display allowing you to watch digital movie contents in any place where there's Wi-Fi.

Link
Found via We make money not art

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Full res, feature-length film playing off iPod Shuffle


I... I mean a friend of mine, ripped a feature length DVD to the H.264 format, and then transferred the resulting (800mb) file to an iPod shuffle. This is a picture of the movie playing, full speed, full resolution (and I mean full resolution. It looks good) off the iPod Shuffle. This movie is playing over USB.

I did the encoding using Hand Brake for OS X. The only kink in the whole thing is that a good 2-pass encoding from DVD to H.264 took almost 9 hours on a G5. But this really reminds me of the first time I made mp3's out of one of my audio CD's (back in the dark ages) so I could listen to it on my computer without the disc... It's the beginning of something big.

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

paul_slocum's Atari 2600 color sequencer



Paul Slocum has posted some info on his blog about his recent art installation- Televisions hooked up to Atari 2600's running custom carts, reflecting color combinations off a gallery wall:
The setup is 3 TVs facing the wall attached to 3 Atari 2600 consoles, and the Ataris are programmed to play a repeating sequence of color that lasts about 4 minutes.

Each color is actually made up of two colors that are mixed by displaying one color at the top half of the screen and the other one at the bottom, and the two are swapped at 30Hz. It gives the sense that the colors are flowing. And the refresh frequency for each TV is gently modulated out of sync with the others, which gives the light even more motion.

This piece will be installed at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary in Dallas, June 25th - July 30th.

Photron - 3000fps @ 1024x1024 -yeehaw!

Photron - High-Speed Cameras and Primatte shoots 3000fps at 1024x1024, or 10,000fps at 512x512 pixels. Or check out the gallery of super high speed footage.

High-Speed video cameras

Sam writes:
somewhat related to your recent foray into slow mo stuff - engadget had an
interesting article today:
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000043047434/
on this high speed video camera:
http://photron.com/products.cfm?id=KingOfHighSpeedVideo
http://photron.com/gallery/gallery.cfm
Thought you might be interested if you hadn't seen it already.
Really slow site right now though...

Photron - High-Speed Cameras and Primatte

Digital Media Thoughts - Digital Media News & Views

How to get PVR content onto your Sony PSP - it's specific to the Beyond TV PVR software, but interesting nonetheless. Step by step instructions. PSP's are quickly becoming the portable media player of choice.

-mike

Friday, June 17, 2005

Volumetric Video, Averaged Video

Two Video Things previously linked from my other blog:

[Volumetric Video] The basic idea is simple: Video is composed of a large number of individual frames, each with X and Y dimensions. Just stack each frame on top of the next and you've got a Z dimension to place into a volume renderer.



Jason Salavon has made a number of art pieces with averaged images, kind of in the spirit of Brian Whitman's computer-averaged holiday record A Singular Christmas. In The Late Night Triad, 64 nights worth of late night talk shows were aligned and averaged until they revealed 'ghosts of repititious structure'.

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

MacWorld (finally) reviews Final Cut Express HD

Macworld: Review: Final Cut Express HD


Final Cut Express HD is a solid entrant into the world of semi-professional editing at a reasonable price. If you’re not rushing out to buy an HDV camcorder, the most compelling new features are the Digital Cinema Desktop and the additions of LiveType 1.2.1 and Soundtrack 1.2.1 (which, admittedly, are pretty cool). But given Apple’s emphasis on HD, and the fact that each version of Final Cut Express is basically a stripped down version of the previous year’s Final Cut Pro, this party is definitely going to be hopping in the future.

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

DIY Optics projects

Yair writes:

nice selection of diy optics from a surplus optics store-
http://www.anchoroptics.com/documents/
found via http://www.htservices.com/Tools/MachineVision/index.htm

Monday, June 13, 2005

When too many geek threads cross - Star Wars Lego Video Game - 3D rendered Legos

Lego Star Wars: The Video Game - this one is just getting too weird - It's Star Wars. Portrayed in Legos. In 3D. On Mac OS X. Altogether now: Star Wars/Lego/Mac geeks, unite!

Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Slit Scan

Michelle from Chaise Magazine writes:

...you might be interested in Golan Levin's slitscan video project repository. some very very cool experiments with "video cubism'" type work - http://www.flong.com/writings/lists/list_slit_scan.html (he also has lists of eyetracking and image averaging artwork at http://www.flong.com/writings/lists/)

"Slit-Scan imaging techniques are used to create static images of time-based phenomena. In traditional film photograhy, slit-scan images are created by exposing film as it slides past a slit-shaped aperture. In the digital realm, thin slices are extracted from a sequence of video frames, and concatenated into a new image."

New Scientist - Card trick holds promise for movie effects

A bunch of people sent in links to the Dual Photography site, but it seemed a little too tech-y to post yet. Today NewScientist has a shorter summary of what it is and what it means for the effects industry. The basic idea is that they hit an object with light from a projector and take a digital photo from a different angle, and then are able to extrapolate an image of the view from the projector just from the reflected light. It's a neat trick, but the New Scientist article adds,
Eventually, dual photography could be used to alter lighting after a movie scene has been filmed or to add photorealistic virtual objects and characters that cast realistic shadows in post-production.

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

USATODAY.com - $29.95 disposable video cameras

The first one-time-use video camera goes on sale this week at CVS drugstores in the Northeast. The $30 camera saves images to internal memory, and is returned to a CVS chain for processing and DVD burning at an extra cost.

Link
Found Via PSFK

Sunday, June 05, 2005

Lenses...

Bohus Blahut (BOH-hoosh BLAH-hoot), the director of one of Tree Wave's videos, writes:
I've tried posting on the blog under the name "Gulag Picture Radio" BTW, and while I'm all registered and everything I don't see any of my posts anywhere. Just thought I'd mention that.


Anybody else having trouble posting comments? I'll check on it... -W


A few items that I've used in front of the camera are as follows:

Anamorphic lens taken from a WWII gun camera (?). It weighs around 20 pounds and has a mount unlike anything I've ever seen - it's about 6-8" across. Needless to say I never actually mounted it to the camera, instead holding it. I also seem to remember devising some sort of mount on a mic stand. I've used it with several video cameras (Canon L-1 and XL-1 come to mind) and with a Bolex 16mm camera.



Fresnel magnifying sheet originally manufactured as a cheap magnifying glass for older folks. Because it is thin plastic and flexible, you can get a lot of cool distortions that way. I've also seen similar flexi sheets with a bunch of little miniature fresnel patterns on them. They are sometimes used as privacy screens that you paste to your bathroom windows to let light in, but not let anyone see in.

Thin (but stiff) mylar squares - often used as mirrors in kids toys or books. Mount this in front of your camera at a 45 degree angle, then shoot your subject with the camera pointed sideways in relation to them. Flex the mirror for weird effects, remembering to flip the picture orientation in your editing software. The BBC used to use this effect for Doctor Who for when the Ice Warriors shot anyone. They used something called "Mirrorlon" which I would expect to be much thinner than the mirror I'm talking about which would give you some nice ripply distortion.

I've also used a lot of still photography filters with video cameras. Here in Chicago there are massive photography swap meets where you can get tons of special effects filters for next to nothing. Many of them can be useful for video. I've used a star filter, fly's eye filter (image in middle surrounded by 5 identical images, and filter can rotate - great for 60's pop singer look), polarizing filter (great for cutting glare when shooting through a window, or for making a car look less scratched up), center focus, some gradiated filters for dramatic skies...

The problem is that with my current video cam (the Canon XL-1) the lens is so massive, it's so hard to find filters to fit it at these swap meets. Common filters for still photography are 45-55mm (probably other sizes too), and the XL-1 clocks in at a massive 72mm. You can get adapter step-down rings to compensate, then zoom in a little to avoid vignetting.

There are also some great gadgets that I've used with old film cameras in front of the lens that aren't filters. My Bolex has had an iris attachment (for transition effects), a clock work device for a variety of animated wipes, titling rigs, and my personal favorite... a 3D lens set for shooting 3D films. Before you ask, yes I've shot some 3D footage, but I'm missing one important part of the projector arrangement to see if my experiment worked. :)

Saturday, June 04, 2005

Lenses

A while back I wrote about infrared filter lenses for DV cameras. I'm interested in what other weird lenses are out there- maybe impractical for regular, professional use - but perfect for video projects that are... ahem.. *crunked up*. And don't just say "fish-eye!"

Post in the comments or send us a tip.

Thursday, June 02, 2005

kiteCam


VT reader Yair Reshef writes:
been watching your blog and i feel this can be of interest to you. [...]
I shot this footage using a 25 dollar wireless cam i order of eBay. hooked it to a kite and it gave nice results.

i also tried to make low cost diy video/music scratching platform, like this stuff using a broken turntable with a reflective sticker on it, a small securtiy camera and eyesweb for tracking and was able to get some nice results. its still ver. 0.1 but its a proof-of-concept i guess. very responsive. and with several records with different diameters can be used to scratch several different sources! [ link]

Kurt Ralske


VT reader Kurt Ralske sent us some kind words and a link to his portfolio of excellent video art. Pieces include a permanent display at the MOMA that's tied-in with the Museum's visual branding, a collaborative video improv piece made by three different artists, and a visualization generated from live video feeds of zebra fish.

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Call for links

Do you have a garage video project you're dying to tell someone about? Has the Asperger's syndrome sufferer next door hacked a Commodore 64 to do 3D? Got the scoop on some new HD video microscope? Got a motion graphics project to show off, or saw a great reel we missed?

Send in your video thing tips!


In the meantime, here's a piece from Tom's Hardware Guide on How to build your own XGA video projector for 300 dollars.

Rtv Visual Entertainment Generator


80 bucks seems a little steep for this, but I can see how it could be handy- the RTV lets you use VGA computer monitors as NTSC monitors, without a computer.
Now you can put an old VGA monitor to good use, or simply get more out of the one that's connected to your PC. The Visual Entertainment Generator, or 'VEG', is a compact external unit that easily turns a VGA monitor into a multimedia center for watching TV or for use as a display for your favorite gaming console.[...]The VEG uses 3:2 pull down correction that eliminates jitter from DVD movies that occurs during the transfer from film. With motion and adaptive de-interlacing, the VEG improves the clarity and sharpness of the picture.

Link

Psyop- Bubbles



Nice new piece of work by PsyOp. Justin at Tween (who is mirroring the clip) says each particle is hand placed, which would certainly make for a lot of painstaking work.

Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Media Sensitive glasses (we-make-money-not-art)

This is a slightly less aggressive take on the TV-B-Gone device: Sunglasses that go black when there is a TV in sight.
As part of her Social Defense Mechanisms: Tools for Reclaiming our Personal Space research, Limor Fried (creator of the Wave Bubble and the Minty MP3) developed the Media-Sensitive Glasses that automatically darken whenever a television is in view, so as to protect the wearer from television's 'hypnotic' effect.

Link

Thursday, May 26, 2005

Setpixel // Shadow Story


Shadow Story allows children to physically play with sketches that they created. Shadow Story is a projection-based interactive installation. Children cast shadows on the wall using their bodies to interact with the elements in the visual projection...

Link

Edirol CG-8 Visual Synthesizer


Why rely on software to generate your cheesy dance-club visuals when you can buy an expensive piece of hardware to do it?

CG-8 Visual Synthesizer

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Apple - Mac OS X Downloads - Video - Trans Lucy

For people with serious attention deficit disorder:
[Trans Lucy] Allows you to watch DVDs on your computer in a whole new way. The movie display can be floated above all applications and the translucency of the video can be adjusted so you can see through the video and work with documents underneath.

Link

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

SSSSSSLLLLLOOOOOO MMMMMOOOOOO VVVVVIIIDDDDEEEEOOOOOO

Slo/Mo Video: Touring Festival+DVD+Website, Seeking one hundred and twenty slow motion video submissions. Each exactly 1 minute in length. Deadline July 15th, 2005. Fiction and non-fiction, The more crunked up the better.

That sounds like a challenge. I'm game. Nick, didn't you say you just got an AE plugin that will do some kind of motion interpolation that would allow you to do convincing slow motion in already shot video?
Link

Quartz Composer Samples

Quartz Composer is a developer tool that ships with Mac OS X 10.4 ("Tiger") that allows you to access all the nifty graphical powers of Tiger's CoreImage without having to learn how to program. Fooling around with it I managed to make a couple of screen savers, and I can already see that there's a lot more potentially that could be done with it. Quartz Composer has controller patches for midi input, but what I think would be really nifty is if you could use it to create your own iTunes visualizers. I'd love to see something replace the tie-dyed-vomit visualizer that has been shipping (relatively unchanged) with iTunes since it first came out. It was fine in 1995, but it just doesn't show off what the Mac can do now, it's an embarrassment. The current homebrew visualizers aren't much better.
I want someone to make an Atari Video Music Emulator!

Check out some sample Quartz compositions on this Japanese page: (You'll need to have Tiger/QuickTime 7 installed)
Link
Found Via QuartzComps.com

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

H.264 day three: Demonstrations at HD resolutions

Shapeofdays.com has a bunch of very informative H.264 tests, basically affirming what we already know, that at the present moment it's God's-own-codec.
Link
Thanks, Mike!

Friday, May 06, 2005

My ghetto 360° video experiment

Inspired by this previous Video Thing post about panoramic video, here's my incredibly lo-fi DIY attempt.



Old plastic Christmas tree bauble I found in the garden the other day
+
Felt tip pen
+
Blu Tak
=

+
"Polar Coordinates" distortion in After Effects
=


1.1mb mpeg4 test clip!


EDIT - now also on Youtube! :)



It's decidedly fuzzy, and my demo isn't exactly spectacular as the camera was tethered to capture card and power supply, (battery dead & couldn't be bothered to find a blank tape) but works much better than I thought it would! Exciting results for such a half-baked attempt.

I'm going to build a more robust and high quality version (ie get a better mirror ball!) some time soon.

Oh, and by the time I took the above photo of my setup it had gone a bit wonkey, but I did have the ball lined up with the lens much better than it looks there!

Thursday, May 05, 2005

Near-Near Future: Khronos Projector

"The Khronos Projector allows people to visualize movie content in a new way. By actually touching and deforming the screen, the user can send portions of the image forward or backward in time."
Link

Saturday, April 30, 2005

The Ebeling Group

Mo Mograph. Check out "lobo/diesel/dreams" in their recent work section. Great 'sketch' cell shader effect.
Link

H.264 looks guuud.

H.264 (Otherwise known as AVC), the new video codec in QuickTime 7 looks... really... good. The file sizes are smaller than regular mpeg4 or sorenson, and the picture looks so much better that there's really no contest. If you've got QuickTime 7 installed and you have a reasonably stacked G5, take a look at some trailers for really bad movies in HD.
Try resizing them. Yesterday I saw one of these trailers stretched across two 30 inch displays in extended desktop mode, no slowdown, no visible pixelization or artifacts... do you hear me? NONE.

Friday, April 29, 2005

DoggiCam


Doggicam make freaky steadycam mounts. This stuff is way beyond the general price-range of Video Thing, but I just can't get enough of this example picture of one of their rigs. Look at that guy... he's crazy.

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

ROB-1, bluetooth robot camera



Rob-1 is a bluetooth controlled robot camera for Sony Ericsson phones. This could only be used for evil.
Link

Sunday, April 24, 2005

Movie Mincer


Video Thing reader Fumes writes:
heres some attachment a guy made for his laptop. its like a meat mincer that he modded and now it controls video in real time.

Link

Saturday, April 23, 2005

Processing 1.0 (BETA)


Processing is a programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an open-source alternative to commercial software tools in the same domain.


Link
Found Via Tween, a super cool site that Nick pointed out to me.

Thursday, April 21, 2005

Near IR filters for video


These are infrared pass filters that can be used with some older DV cams with a nightshot feature- essentially they block out most visible light and only allow IR to come in. Sony eventually modified their cameras so that this wouldn't work as well, due to concern that people were using it to (ohmygod) sort of see people's underwear if they were wearing thin clothes in direct sunlight. Beyond this stupid trick though, near IR photography produces interesting effects. Foliage appears white, and things take on a kind of alien affect. I happen to have a camera that this will work with, so I'm considering picking up one of these lenses. You can test the sensitivity of your CCD camera to IR by operating your IR remote controller in front of it. If you see flashing on the remote controller where IR transmitters in it are, your camera is somewhat sensitive to IR light.
Link

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Atari Video Music


Chuck Clark sends us his great page of information about an ancient Atari-branded Music visualizer- Atari Video Music.
Additional Link

Monday, April 18, 2005

Setpixel // Ghostly Mirror


Untitled Mirror is a Processing based program that reads incoming video from a camera and triggers particles from points of the video frame that have changed by a certain level. The result is an image that is fairly representative, yet disappears within moments.

Link

Digital Cinema Summit Day Two: New High End Digital Cameras

THE SHOOTING GALLERY: NEW HIGH-END DIGITAL CAMERAS

John Coghill - Dalsa
Franz Kraus - Arriflex
Jeff Kreines - Kinetta
Nolan Murdock, Panavision
David Stump, ASC, Moderator

David - film & digital are collaborating rather than fighting

3 chip prism based vs. 1 chip new camera

35mm lenses on HD cameras, depth of field & image quality

4:4:4 color space

film style accessories

talk about workflow, all the way to filmout- the WHOLE workflow

What makes these cameras so special?

John/Dalsa - 4K

workflow is the new mantra, a lot of intricacies to workflow, for cinematographers, they are worried that creative intent flows all the way through the process; Below The Line has an article on "DPs want pay for DI duty" - 2 things mentioned - Daviau said he couldn't have made Van Helsing w/out DI, Bob Richardson/Tarantino fight over control over Kill Bill.

how to will cameras ensure intent is carried through?
-metadata
-SMPTE .dpx - 4K 16 bit"format for the exchange of digital moving pictures ona variety of media between comptuer based system"

-flexible res indie, attributes in file header
-individual 16 bit files DPX inside folders, script supervisor info builit into that, each scene/shot/take recorded as a folder
-onset CDL (color decision list), look manamgement system can be embedded in file header
-render a full res "wedge" that can be embedded inthe CDL to be included inthe file header to make some basic decisions on set to go with the data
-when agreement is reached on a format it will be a siimple matter to implement within the .dpx header

"committees make progress one funeral at a time"

WHERE'S ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT FOR 35MM LIKE CQUALITY

Usability:
-compatibility with existing accessories, 35mm lenses, backfocus range, single chip, large format sensor
-optical viewing system with rotating mirror, SOA (safe operating area)
-simple user menus, not too many menu layers deep
-record via fiber up to2 2Km (cranes, remote spots w/limited space)
-records to drives
-bidirectional communication to send images to set

Image Quality:
-optical input - lots of exposure lattitude, spatial res, and "fill factor" are key (a catchall for how much of the surface area of the chip is capable of converting image into picture - minimal gutters?)
-they make their own sensors, their own chipsets
-conversion from analog to digital can't compromise images, highest bandwidth pipeline possible maintained - no video formatting
-record "digital negative" - no pre-baked decisions, you record 16 bit linear raw files, maximum room to mess with it
-good source to archiving

Workflow compatibility:
-capture to drives with digital neg quality
"DALSA Certified Post House" - (scary!)
-data centric approach enables compatibility with multiple formats and tools
-they have a 4K pipeline on their site for stuff to play with
-full screening room w/2K projector
-plan is to work w/post facilities to test facilities and certify the process, continuity of metadata etc.
-metadata - ensures elements don't get "lost" between multiple sights
-enables easy editing, conforms, synch sound etc.
-single source master philosophy
-dpx already supports film & TV formats - (film mfg & type, shutter angle, frame rate, etc. etc. etc.

Conclusion:
role of camera manufacturer changing:
-must take a system perspective
-must enable more than just great images
-must be compatible with familiar tools
-must integrate into the whole workflow

SHOWING DALSA SAMPLE FOOTAGE:

shots holds sky/clouds detail and mountain shadow detail

interiors seeing outside

seeing 12 stops of exposure lattitude, a couple more on the top end, 14 stops total

shot some night stuff, they couldn't get spot meter readings, saw detail on footage



JEFF KREINES, KINETTA
========================

-camera is designed for nonfiction and indie filmmakers, self contained recordeer

480 GB storage

records to "paranoid RAID", 12 drives, 10 drives primary, 1 RAID 3 parity, 1 hot spare

magazine in camera attach by bidirectional fiber link, can separate by a coupla kilometers, a single 6mm cable (3mm fiber optic inside)

-record 12 channels of 12 bit 96Khz audio, 4 analog, 8 digital

-workflow:
many different ways to go, store data in raw format, raw single sensor output like a digital still camera, get a 3:1 savings in storage space, don't do demosaic at time of capture
-data all stored raw w/metadata
-working w/Iridas speedgrade for Kinettta
USB cable into ccamera, load in up to 3D nondestructive LUTs, dual link HD-SDI, DVI LUTs for lots of stuff, looks recorded as metadata,
-don't ever mess w/your digital neg
-how do you store it inexpensively
-looked at HDCAM SR and nixed it, $100/hr, $100K deck
-two different options to store - using LTO3 tapes, uncompressed 400GB tapes, $100 each, 7 tape autoloader for $6 or %7K
-clones a mag to roughly realtime for almost 2 hours of stuff
-magazines are about 1 hour for 480 GB
-they also make a box that'll let you dump to a set of 6 drives
-one new exciting feature - new dynamic range expansion feature - camera is designed to be sensor agnostic, using Altasens at the moment, can run for hours on one battery (low power draw)
OLED viewfinder can be up to 10 feet away
-4 user definable buttons on the viewfinder
-camera designed to handle any sensor up to 16 megapixels, you'd need more than one magazine to record 4K
-concurrent photon amplification for dynamic range expansion - it takes 6 photons to make "real" data - if you add a little bit of light to that, or use more aggressively to reduce contrast
-have an integrating chamber, have RGB LEDs to boost around the sensor, all done optically around the sensor
-852x600 for viewfinder
-workflow: with Iridas, can make LUTs stored in camera, can plug laptop in via USB into a magazine, feed to monitor, can create new LUTs for every shot on the drive - can do a post shoot color grade onto the file header, can have multiple LUTs, do it into your hotel room
-workflow for smaller crews
-beauty of what they're doing serves different sets of users, not in competition
-JEFF STILL ISN'T SHOWING ANY SAMPLE FOOTAGE!!! DAMMIT!

Q: memory requirements for 100 minute of footage:

Nolan, Panavision guy:

don't limit yourself during acquisition is a lesson learned - don't limit to TV color space

"do no harm" during original acquisition

-they do ship more diffusion filters than lenses

-"the film camera that shoots tape" it was dubbed for the Genesis

Genesis uses all their standard cinema accessories
Millenium XL is about same size as their smallest/lightest camera, same weight about too
-super 35mm sized sensor
12 megapixel true RGB, no Bayer
1 to 50 fps
nominal exposure 400
dual link HD-SDI out
14 bit A/D
dockable VTR (no cables)
-10 bit log color
-custom gamma curve for extending overexposure lattitude
-wide color gamut for film intercut applications
-can load LUTs into the viewfinder to see what it would look like
-lens lateral color compensation
-can correct that lens on the fly and record an image without lateral chroma for pulling better mattes on green/bluescreen
-uses spherical lenses, will have anamorphic at CineGear
-they use a macrocell - a 6 pixel thing - RGB over RGB, 3x2 grid to make colors, these add up to make a pixel, like a Trinitron

Workflow:
-dual link HD-SDI 10 bit log, custom gamma curve
-raw image is flat and low contrast
-custom display boxes allow, can load LUTs made in PShop (nice!)
-can record all kinds of metadata
-provide to post facilities appropriate gray box and color cube for calibration
-load a LUT into a "preview box" to preview that way, without touching the raw source
Editorial opportunties:
on set downconvert to NTSC or PAL
-networked device with removable drive packs
-synced oaudio and time code
-listens for Genesis to go into record, it goe sinto record
-writes native Avid files
-collects scene and take info from other networked device, adds metadata
-remove disk packs, mount as Avid drives, cutting in minutes
WHAT ABOUT FINAL CUT PRO INTEGRATION?

Off speed tests done, showing in booth, check it out in Sony booth

ARRIFLEX GUY:

D-20 workflow technology
showed footage - looks like video, candle flames a bit sharp - the color is rich, and has very good color detail - come see their booth for more footage

goals of test:

-test in realworld environment, got some good screening material, proof of operational practice & workflow, got good feedback

D-20 modular design:
PL mount, optical viewfinder, mirror shutter,
-silent mirrored shutter
-camera control electronics down where they are expected
-wanted look & feel of operating traditional film camera
-CMOS image sensor, custom developed
-35mm format CMOS, ARRI custom development
-sensor can do 150fps, NOT accomodated in camera
-2880x2160
bayer mask
400 ISO equivalent
at least 10 f stops
on lattitude - most folks don't use film as rated, they are curious to see real world usage
-has three output boards - (they use metadata for digital and film related), so much intent gets lost with distributed production, wanted to fit into existing workflows. Have 3 different cards and electronic processes for different lookup tables, camera runs up to 60 fps, need dual link for that, log data stream for post, separate HD-SDI for monitoring, and an SD output for

HD and raw modes

alias free 1920-0x1080 @ 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 HD
LUT options including log/lin
variable speed - 1 to 60 fps (how to record/flag/extract?)
by using 3Kx2K that allows for an alias free HD

WORKFLOW:
shoot, conform/grading feeds all others
if film out, need a color management system to filmout

DI log workflow, need LUTs for video and projector outputs

4K digital cinema - they can't do it yet on their current imager (implies others can't as well)

If you pull a 2K out of the 4K

shows some image extraction if you pull subsections - zooming in

film offers res>2K, exposure lattitude>12 stops, archival advantages, high frame rates w/resolution, high quality, efficient film/DI stuff, worldwide workflow known

D-20: immediacy, no grain, no scratches/dirt/dust, no weave, cost of high shooting ratio

digital will complement, not replace film
DI provides a common platfor for material acquired on film & digitally

Q&A:
----

cost of media to store 100 minutes of footage:

400GB for 100 minutes for Kreines
TB/HR for Dalsa
D-20 size - HD as done now, so run the math there...
Nolan - same for his as well

Kreines said - Digital Cinema is a long way off for now...filmouts are going to be relevant for quite some time, against using dupe stocks for digitally originated stuff, use 5205 for affordable film stocks, make multiple original negatives rather than dupes, can take raw files, got into Iridas, work on timeline, go to film recorder

D-20 panel ready to run again:

AHH! some nice depth of field digital wouldn't do, good shadow detail video would never get, closeups of candles - OK, couldn't do vidoe for that well, outdoor stuff - Hmm...hI'm not loving it for some reason - maybe projection issues?

TAKEAWAY - image quality is pretty good, but film continues to sound better and better...costs of overall stuff! Kreines made no comment on image quality or cost or availability (later said looks like fall or 6 months from now). Somebody who's worked extensively with the Viper said that they were very underwhelmed with the Genesis after all the hype about it.

-mike

Walter Murch on Soundtrack Pro

Walter Murch on the new version of Soundtrack.

More Automated Analysis

My last post has me thinking about more upcoming or perhaps already released automated processes.

For example, automated z-depth analysis (the computer analyses motion parallax and so forth to ascertain which objects are in front of each other (and how far away they are) and then gives each object a greyscale color relative to that depth. For example if I am waving my hand in front of the camera, my hand would be white (close) and the house behind me would be grey (farther) and the verdant hills in the background would be black (farther still). These guys claim they will do something called automated z-depth exraction with their PFTrack 3 detailed in this press release, but don't really say what automated means.

Which brings me to my main question - we have some software that can perform pretty fancy edge detection analysis (Twixtor is pretty good at this, for example), but how come programs can't indentify basic moving shapes as basic moving shapes and perform a sort of foreground/background analysis? It seems like it would be so easy - let's isolate the moving orange thing from the grey drab things, but (with the possible exception of some of the techniques from my last post) I can't think of anybody who's doing this.

So, everybody, have any of you seen research on this kind of stuff? Even ANY kind of automated motion or subject analysis? There are lots of specialized medical research gizmos that isolate and track eye movement and I recall a government program designed to analyse people's gait (and until you have to walk in front of a greenscreen to get on a plane, I assume they are able to ascertain foreground/background), but I would love to see a sifter that could analyse a media library and, say, pull up all instances of a white Buick.

This is vaguely project related, so any help/thought is appreciated.

No More MoCo. Yay, yay, yay.

Here's a peek into the future that's particularly exciting:

Video Matching

This reminds me a little of the product 2D3's purportedly been working on for a while (these demo movs have been on their site for at least two years but if they can get around to delivering any kind of automated functionality similar to what is suggested by these demos then they can take their time). The bus demo is my favorite - if you keep your eyes peeled you'll notice the blobby figures on the far right who in their way really verify to me that the software is doing exactly what it claims to be doing.

Pixel Dust

The prospect of combining camera matching and the kind of analysis behind Pixel Dust means that motion control style shots can finally move away from two ton noisy slow moving thousands of dollars in cash and prizes to rent for eight hourslandia which has huge implications for the way fx shots are used and created for the rest of us. Or so sez I.

Sunday, April 17, 2005

More mograph telent- Panoptic

Panoptic

Live Apple Show coverage: From macosXrumors

Live Apple Show coverage: From macosXrumors

FCP5: realtime and on the fly HD editing, support for HD & IMX 50 formats, Dynamimc RT Extreme (need to know more!), P2 support, 24 channel audio, multi-cam support

Panasonic's AF-HVX200 I've been writing about - later this year, $6K (whoo hoo!)

Soundtrack Pro announced, DVD Studio Pro 4 - can make HD-DVDs, grid computing style support for compression tasks (distributed encoding across network - NICE!)

Shake 4 mentioned

Final Cut Studio $1299, $699 upgrade (order now...)

Saturday, April 16, 2005

The Censtron Wave Vessel

Sabastian from the circuit bending group Censtron writes:
Hey i just wanted to say i like your new blog a lot! totally excited about it....I know this has already been on music thing and stuff but i figured i'd link you to our wave vessel in case you need some content :) heres the "how to" article on turning a tv into an oscilloscope.

Amazing collection of Pre-VHS video hardware


LabGuy's World: The History of Video Tape Recorders before Betamax and VHS

Lots of pictures of and info on a huge collection of extinct video hardware! Reel to reel VTRs, tube cameras, obscure formats such as "Cartrivision" and more. Includes video clips from some of the devices, plus lots of scans of manuals and other documentation, links and historical info. Terrifyingly in depth site!

Panoramic Video Field Test

Taking bizzare motion affect (or is it effect?) to the streets, as it were.

Friday, April 15, 2005

Psyop

More mograph goodness:
Psyop

Obsolete video formats


This post is just an excuse to post a picture of a Burt Reynolds' SelectaVision CED Video disc. These sad, hulking, extinct things were like titanium-coated phonograph records, but for video. And the best part is that they look like enormous (bigger than laserdiscs enormous) floppy discs.
There's a couple of incomplete lists of dead video formats here and here.

Thursday, April 14, 2005

LFS

Um, nothing technical here...just an admiration of these guys' work:

LIFELONG FRIENDSHIP SOCIETY

I've amazed at how many of these companies thrive in advertising these days.

Drachenfeder - Drake digital HD film camera

Drachenfeder - Drake digital HD film camera

Somebody sent in a link to this...a $20K 720p camera that captures 10 bit log if I'm reading this correctly.

I think cameras of this nature will be relevant to indie filmmakers...whether this one in particular is or not, I don't know, need to learn more. All the samples look dim.

-mike

Free AE plugz page of the day

Pete Warden's Free Video Effects.

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

TinyProjector


I envision a day where you can have a keychain fob that will project "Real Genius" in HD across the side of a building whenever you point and squeeze it.
The basic idea of TinyProjector is to create the smallest possible character projector that can be either integrated into mobile device, or linked dynamically with wireless RF connections like serial low range transceivers.

Link

hideous 50 dollar children's video camera


When video stuff gets this cheap, even if it's horrible VHS stuff, that's when it gets bendable.
Real-working video camera has a microphone and cassette player, so kids can sing along with their favorite tunes while the video camera rolls! Plus, the camera connects right to your VCR, so you can record and play back every performance! 10 1/2'; with headphones. 8 AA batteries not included. (4-13 years)

Link

1 Beyond introduces PRO HD flex

1 Beyond introduces PRO HD flex

OK, this is really interesting, and similar to what RaveHD is up to.

These are why I've pretty much abandoned my own direct to disk uncompressed product - stuff like this seems to be pretty well filling the market needs.

configurable solutions for HD stuff. Full uncompressed RT SD/HD system w/1TB of removable disks fro $15K.

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Software SDK for Canon XL2: This could be fun...

Macworld: News: SDK for Canon XL2 camcorder coming in July

This could be interesting geeky fun - a Mac SDK (software developer kit) to let you control the XL2's functions from a Mac app. Should be some interesting capabilities to be extracted from this - timelapse, funky exposure settings, multi-frame blending, etc.

Sinedots: free, fun, useless AE plugin

Sinedots is an interesting looking sine visualizer plugin for After effects.
Here's a clip of it undulating.

Circuit Bent PXL-2000

I've seen lots of circuit bent musical instruments, but this is the first piece of video gear I've seen get bent. Waterhed modifies old Fisher Price PXL-2000 cameras in order to give them RCA outputs and some built in "effects".
With this modified camera you have your choice of recording onto the onboard cassette as normal or sending the signal into an external recording source for pro playback via the rca output jacks ive added. Also, inludes a signal amp that will allow you to shoot to any DIGITAL CAMCORDER OR VHS DECK without the frustrating blue screen or very dark image that that usually accompany todays modern camcorders. You simply connect this box between your PXL2000 and DV cam, it runs on a 9v battery and comes with on/off switch and LED indicator... In case you aren't hip to the whole PXL2000 trip, it is a "KIDS TOY CAMERA" made in the 80's that shoots a pixelated black and white image to a audio cassette or to external vhs decks. WATERHED tweaks, restores, and improves them to BEYOND their STOCK BEST.... but if you get the CIRCUIT BENT VERSION it opens up even more realms of morphing fun.

Link

Welcome to Video Thing

Yes, it's a direct ripoff of the wonderful Music Thing Blog, but about video. So if you read Music Thing, you already know sort of what we're looking for. Software, plugins, weird or interesting hardware, techniques, and we're going to go one further to include especially impressive motion graphics work-in-progress and reels.

I'll start off with a link I already posted on my other blog and then get back to work before someone catches me blogging.


Vintage analog video generators:
Video Synthesizers usually refer to analog devices from the early '70s driven by oscillators, similar to analog audio synthesizers. They create and modify video in realtime.

Link