Create Digital Motion

MomentFactory have released a video displaying some of the tech behind Nine Inch Nails fantastic Lights In The Sky tour.It’s a heady mix of tech, combining “stealth” LED screens, laser-controlled interactive video, particles, feedback, cameras… Oh my!There’s further information and video available on Wired’s coverage of the show, including future plans from NIN’s art director [...]

Mickey Mann from Matti Niinimäki on Vimeo.MATTI NIINIMÄKI, aka Original Hamsters, has been hacking away with the fantastic new, open-source animation package Animata. Using OpenSoundControl (OSC), he can control live animation with two other open source tools: “Pure Data” Pd (which opens up all sorts of other sonic and control capabilities) and the [...]

moiré (piano and organ) from defetto on Vimeo.I expect I’m not alone in this: I use to spend time as a kid listening to long records of Beethoven and other stuff I loved, doodling endlessly in a sketchbook. I immediately found stimulation in the challenges of synesthesia: did that squiggle that [...]

All is quiet as this week folks celebrate Christmas and Hanukah. But this is a quick note to say that we won’t be waiting until the ball drops to jump start one New Year’s Resolution a lot of readers have: learning Processing, the artist-friendly, multimedia-savvy, open-source coding platform. We’ll be kicking off a series of [...]

We are truly entering a glorious era of visual effects, one in which you won’t have to wait for epic, budget-blowing fantasy box office train wrecks (ah, Willow) just to see eye candy onscreen. Now you just need to wait for someone to blow a massive budget on a music video.Want proof? How about this [...]

You’ve likely seen impressive sequenced Christmas lights in videos before. Very often, though, these setups use proprietary systems. Here, Processing makes it quick and easy to code lighting effects in a friendly, open-source environment. And, naturally, if you think you might want to do something like this and don’t want to wait for Christmas 2009, [...]

Happy 2009! from postspectacular on Vimeo.I can’t say it any better than this. A big Happy New Year to the planet. 2009 looks to be a breakout year for Create Digital Motion, with all we’ve got planned – starting with helping you get on top of your New Years’ Resolutions tomorrow [...]

Doing live visuals and other projects means sometimes endless conversion and editing tasks, but many of the dedicated tools for the job are just too much. I’ve been playing around with Video Converter from Extensoft, which is about perfect I think in terms of what you most often need to do. It’s an ideal [...]

Here’s another visualist way to celebrate the coming New Year, from Douglas Edric Stanley:twothousandnine(I’m not including a screen grab as that’ll kill the surprise.)Hmmm, perhaps a series?

Adobe has quietly added some features to Premiere CS4 I would consider really huge. Adobe Updater is normally the little app that delivers Acrobat Reader updates what seems like every other weekday, but imagine my surprise when I opened it today: a little New Year’s present.AAF support (Advanced Authoring Format, an attempt to create [...]

Keep Your Resolutions Dance Party NYE 2009 from Robotkid on Vimeo.How did you spend your New Year’s Eve, visualists? And how much do you love live visuals and dancing?Our friend Robotkid (aka Josh Randall) just showed me this video of the frigid dance party in Boston, complete with –10-degree (Fahrenheit) wind [...]

Accent Feed of San Diego has a fantastic list of the 10 Most Innovative Concert Visuals ‘08. Now, I’m not normally a big fan of top ten lists, but in this case I couldn’t agree more with Migeux. And likewise, with the likes of United Visual Artists’ project for Massive Attack and the incredible Nine [...]

Finally, NVIDIA extends a welcome mat. Photo by Anna Irsch.For graphics cards, drivers are everything: it’s just not possible to be on top of stability, performance, and functionality without access to new, stable drivers. But for Windows notebooks, unlike desktops, traditionally you had to turn to OEM PC vendors to get your NVIDIA graphics [...]

It’s port talk time again.As I suspected, Apple’s 17” MacBook Pro does get one additional port. You get 3 USB ports and one FireWire 800 port – though this means that, even though there’s almost no hardware that supports FW800, you’ll need an adapter for FW400 devices like HDV/DV cameras. At least unlike the [...]

Grant Michaels points to a lovely post on getting started with augmented reality using Flash.FlarToolkit/Flash Augmented Reality [Mikko Haapoja]It’s all free for FlarToolkit, and with free tools for Flex out there, you could build a whole free toolchain. Of course, we tend to like Java and Processing round these parts, so I can add “make [...]

Need some New Year inspiration on several levels? dickypan points to this brilliant New Year’s video. It’ll make you feel good about all dimensions of 2009. Motion graphics fly out of augmented reality, triggered by small objects on the screen.The work is based on an open source framework. Here it’s running in Flash, as:FLARToolKitThat means [...]

Previous modules include GPS, screen, camera, proximity/accelerometer, and some powerful features on the core hardware unit. But a projector? Now we’re really interested.I just recently got my BUG developer hardware from Bug Labs and have begun to work with it. The idea: a Linux-powered, open source mini computer with little modules you snap on [...]

“This is my tree. It makes music.”It took “actual 12-year-old girl” (as Microsoft described her) Sparrow Buerer to rescue Microsoft’s drab CES keynote (and drab tech news week) and get us back into the Future again. That future is one in which the dazzling interactive 3D world of games becomes a playground you [...]

It’s no secret that I’m obsessed with slow motion video, and you people aren’t doing a very good job of hiding your interest either - “high speed camera price” was our #5 search term for the last month. The article that search result points to is from August 2006, and back then a camera shooting [...]

Kevin Kelly recently posted about digital continuity on The Technium. He references David Pogue’s experience of having problems reading DVDs which were only 4 years old.No problem, I thought: I’ve got all of the original iMovie projects backed up on DVD, in clear cases, neatly arrayed in a drawer next to my desk. (My hard [...]