# The Usual Monday Bullshit... - Site: Analog Industries - Author: Chris Randall - Date: 2009-08-31 - URL: https://analogindustries.com/2009/08/the-usual-monday-bullshit/ In no particular order... 1\. This weekend was chock full of RT60 fun and games. We're closing in on having the first release, which is an EP, done. Two songs left to record and then I have to mix everything proper, and then mastering, and then we'll decide how to bare it to the world. 2\. Work proceeds apace on the next AD product. We had a fairly productive week last week and made some good inroads. I think we've invented everything that needs inventing for this particular product, and can now begin construction in earnest. 3\. I'm looking at video synthesis packages. At the risk of stepping on CreateDigitalMotion's toes, I assume many readers here have vast experience with the various environments like ArtMatic, Quartz, et al. What's your preferred package if you do this sort of thing? My initial inclination is to just do everything in Processing, but that isn't exactly a quick workflow, and I'm intrigued to hear of something of which I might not be aware that would be easier. Note that I'm not interested in using video of any sort; our graphics will be entirely procedural (read: synthesized). ## Comments (9) **noisegeek** (2009-08-31): I don't know about the workings of it, but I've seen some very cool stuff come out of vvvv. **synthetic** (2009-08-31): If RT60 tours in New Jersey, be sure to tell the club not to announce you as "Route 60." **Nicholas** (2009-08-31): Actually, I've never found anything I like for that sort of video output. I'd probably go out and write something if somebody gave me a kick in the pants. **giantm** (2009-08-31): If you mean the Quartz Composer stuff by Quartz, it has the benefit of OSC and MIDI support, and execution speed. But the environment is pretty confusing, and it all seems strange compared to other real-time graphics stuff. I find processing work goes faster if you grab the code via SVN and then write proper Java against it.. You get all the niceties of recent Java versions that aren't available in the standalone. Plus, developing your code in Eclipse should be about 5-10 times faster than in the provided editor. You can get the equivalent of a Sketch running in probably around 30 lines of code. What about Max/MSP/Jitter, or Pd equivalent? **Chris Randall** (2009-08-31): Max/MSP/Jitter/Pd are big fat fails where visuals are concerned. I know others will strongly disagree with that, but that's my opinion and I'm sticking to it. -CR **valis** (2009-09-01): What is the intended usage for the video 'synthesis', realtime performance or for producing clips & sequences that can be used in an editor/compositor for normal (prerendered, post-processed) video output? If it's the latter I would use all three apps mentioned so far (processing/vvvv/Quartz Composer) as each have their strengths and easily accessed 'tricks'. Processing is certainly the long way around for some things if you don't already have a library of routines built up, but dipping into it for some procedural/iterative goodness is still worthwhile imo. **onar3d** (2009-09-01): I never thought I'd get the chance to mention my Mother program on this site :) It is a host program that allows you to interactively layer the output of Processing sketches, and route OSC control data to them. It is not as easy to use as QC, but if you already work with Processing the upside is you will not have to re-adapt to the patching paradigm. My website is www.onar3d.com, in case I've gotten you curious. The program is free open source, and there are example videos, code and documentation to get you started. Oh, and it's still windows only! It should be easy to port to the Mac, but I don't know how to do it... **valis** (2009-09-01): Well that seems like it addresses my primary issue with Processing when used live. =-] **vizzie** (2009-09-01): I would check out VidVox's VDMX. It can host Quartz composer patches inside a semi-modular environment (LFOs, Step Sequencer, OSC support). there are people that use it as a pure video synth. There's a pretty active forum on the vidvox.com site to support the software. And it plays well with Ableton Live, so you can sync its clock to Live.