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!

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...

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

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)

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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'.

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.

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

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!