visual looper using syphon?

tomloud

hello nick! for awhile now i've been dreaming of making some kind of visual looper, doing to vision what a looping pedal does for some scratch DJs. i'd love to sample the audio and vision output of ME and SL and make a live looper that looks a bit like a grid tranistion, where you could stack up loops in a grid and then mute and retrigger some. so now with syphon, that could be a good way of sampling the vision output of ME, to another program, and the audio could either be sampled and looped by that program as well, or with LIVE. so (because you have the most helpful online support ever) i was just wondering if you any ideas on what directions, programs, and work flows i should investigate to make this happen? i don't really know anything about modul8 or max, do you have any idea if it's possible and what program i should learn to make it happen? any ideas would be welcome thanks! tom

Nick

That's an interesting idea.... I don't know of any programs that do this already (i.e. video loop recording). There is one way that I can think of that might work though, and that is to output MixEmergency (via Syphon) into a Quartz Composition that you have programmed to do this. There is a Queue patch in Quartz Composer which you should be able to use to buffer video frames (this solution won't help you with the audio buffering problem). You'd also have to program some sort of logic to start/stop buffering, and then to display the frames until you reset it. It could be a little complex to get going if you haven't used Quartz Composer though....

tomloud

ah. quartz composing. i knew i'd have to learn some more about that at some stage...

tomloud

i was kind of hoping a program like modul8 would do live video sampling... a software version of this http://www.korg.com/Product.aspx?pd=416 but with a grid option on the video output

Nick

Yeah, Modul8 may do something like that - but I'm not too familiar with all the features of Modul8.

tomloud

i found this http://kriss.cx/tom/2009/09/sampler/ it can be used with VDMX apparently, which i could link to ME with syphon. got a lot to learn though. you should make a plugin with this function! scratch DJ's would wet themselves

Nick

Nice. The guy that wrote that plug-in is actually one of the two guys who have created the Syphon framework. In theory you wouldn't need VDMX to use that plug-in - you could just create a Quartz Composition (which you're going to have to do to use that plug-in anyway - or which I assume he has already done in a form that you can use within VDMX) and then set it up so you have: MixEmergency -> (Syphon) -> Quartz Composer -> Output

marlon1

Hi Guys Got a question can VDMX work with ME?

Nick

Yes, you can have the output from MixEmergency stream into VDMX via Syphon.

marlon1

Hi Nick Thanks for the information. Nick I'll like your advice if it's okay; I'm gonna do a course in Visual Performance using VDMX, You think that's a good idea?. The creators of VDMX will be teaching the course, I wonder if they would know about ME? Thanks

Nick

Sounds good. They may not be familiar with MixEmergency, but it's easy to set up MixEmergency to output to Syphon. In MixEmergency's Preferences there is a Syphon section in which you can enable it for the Output channel.

marlon1

Thanks Nick