Livecode Festival #2 – Visualists Meetup – 1st September 2018

On Saturday 1st September I’m organising a meetup for visualists as part of Livecode Festival #2 at Access Space in Sheffield:

A session for live coding visualists (at any level) lead by Antonio Roberts (aka hellocatfood), to talk about their tools and how they perform, with focus on Algorave visuals.

A core part of the session will be discussion around key questions for live code visualists; how do you pace yourself in a performance? Should we aim to build up slowly or go straight in with loud visuals? How much can you truly respond to the music? Is it important to show the code, and how does it fit with the musician’s projection?

The session will run from 11:00 – 16:00 and will include workshops in Pure Data/GEM (led by me), Hydra (led by Will Humphries) and Livecodelab (led by Guy John).

Get your tickets here! And whilst you’re in the area get a ticket for the Algorave on the same night at 20:00 😉

Five Days of Pure Data – Stop Motion

In the years that I’ve been creating things in Pure Data I have amassed quite a collection of unfinished and messy patches. Over the next few days I’ll be releasing a few of these patches and techniques that I implement when programming in Pure Data.

Stop Motion

It was at the Co-Position meeting of the Libre Graphics Research Unit in 2012 that I first encountered Toonloop. It’s creator, Alexandre Quessy, gave a live performance using lights, Lego pieces and other objects. I was really quite in awe of how stop-motion was used to create quite an enjoyable performance.

Of course my first instinct was to try and recreate this but in Pure Data. I wasn’t the first to try, and I in fact have some memory of seeing Toonloop’s creator himself trying to write something similar in Pure Data although I can’t find any sources…

My first instinct to recreate Toonloop was to use [pix_write] to write a series of images and then play those back using [pix_image]. The problem there is that there’s no easy way to read an arbitrary set of images from a directory.

In the end I learnt about [pix_buffer_write] which allowed me to story an image frame into a buffer which I can then call back using [pix_buffer_read]. So that’s the basic functionality sorted! When I went to Databit.me in 2013 Axel Debeul helped to improve the patch a lot. The improvements allowed me to save a video from each animation. You can find the most recent version of the patch below

That’s where the problems start to arise, some of which I haven’t solved yet. The videos are created via [pix_record]. When a frame is captured it is sent to [pix_record] and then recording is paused. However, when you look at the saved video it has a really weird frame rate and doesn’t play smoothly. Even when the frame rate is set explicitly it somehow doesn’t work.

Don’t ask me about the cat ears

Perhaps making a video out of the animations is something to be done in post processing rather than in Pure Data. [pix_record] has always been a very complicated object to work with so perhaps I need to investigate further and try to find the right configuration of all of its many options.