I made RokVid, and you can purchase it from Ableton.com. I'm happy to help you work through getting the Kinect involved. I've used the Kinect with RokVid and other devices like it. There are many ways to approach it. What is your project idea?

Hi AROKHSAR, thanks for your reply, I would love to buy RokVid, but I only had the trial version of Ableton, but I've seen your videos for it (can't afford the full version being a Music Tech student and all that, but I'm saving up as Ableton as it's simply the best DAW).

Anyway I literally had such a similar idea, the use of live feed, with colour alteration and movement to generate different sounds, and that's how I came about finding RokVid. I just love the idea of interactivity with the user on the kinect creating music. But I'm not sure how to go about it?

Is there any Max patches I can look at to get an idea of how it works?

Thanks for your reply

If you are new to Max, I'd recommend taking a look through the Jitter tutorials to get a sense of how Max deals with video in general. That way, you'll see how to get a live feed from a camera and movie files into your patch for processing. You'll also see how to create different kinds of video effects.

Once you are able to create some effects you like, you are in a good position to think about how audio can control those effects. My approach is: whenever I create a knob, slider, or number box that I like playing around with, I ask myself, "Is there some data from the world that can play around with this knob/slider/number box for me?" If you are interested in audio, you can then take a look at the MSP tutorial to see how you can build LFOs or use live audio to control your video effect.

In the case of RokVid, I use several LFO shapes (built with cycle~, rect~, saw~, and rand~) and several audio features (built with peakamp~, zerox~, and filters).

For video effects, I use entirely shaders created using jit.gl.pix. If you are not familiar with that, jit.gl.pix is part of the Gen add-on to Max. It lets you create objects that process pixels on your computer GPU using OpenGL, which is an efficient way to perform video processing. I create the effects from scratch, and I often use feedback loops because I like that kind of thing.

If you want to use the Kinect, I suggest you look through the forums to see how people are getting it connected to Max. I use a Mac and have been able to get Kinect data using jit.openni -- however, there are changes up ahead for the Kinect with the end of the OpenNI library so this may change in the near future. You are on a PC, so you will have different options.

Regardless, once you get the Kinect data, it will again be up to you how to map it to turn those knobs/sliders/number boxes, if you want to approach it that way. I hope this was helpful!

Thanks for such an informative piece of information AROKHSAR. I have started trying to use Kinect with Synapse (running through a few OpenNI installation problems at the moment, being Windows and everything..)

Again thanks for the reply, and I'll show you the patch upon completion to see what you think.

Thanks