midi control of swatch and general live video mixing Q?
I'm having a blast building my live video mixing patch. But need guidance as I learn this program.
1. I want to assign two endless midi knobs as x and y control of the swatch object (the box with all the colors of the rainbow laid out on an xy grid) for live video mixing. The swatch object help section has a knob there for horizontal motion but I want another for vertical motion. For some reason when I copy this section of the help patch into my own it won't function. How to midi control this object has overwhelmed me but it's a very powerful object.
2. If I'm mixing three simultaneous videos using 2 jit.op objects and saturation/bright/contrast controls from the tutorial, what would the best codec be to use when exporting these loops? Does using longer video loops slow down the computer? My Powerbook G4 specs are: 1.5 Ghz PowerPC G4 and 2 GB DDR SDRAM memory. I've heard for live mixing jpegphoto 75% quality is best, but my videos are a little strobe lighted.
3. Does assigning a midi control to each of the following for realtime live video mixing sound like it might push my cpu too hard? Does having so many controls available in my jitter patch automatically slow it down?? even if I'm not changing all these values constantly?
2 midi sliders for mixing 2 jit.op objects
9 midi sliders for brightness, saturation, and contrast control of video A, B, and C
6 endless midi knobs for x/y manipulation of swatch object for video A, B, and C
My video projection is a little strobier than I'd like, but I love having this much live mixing control.. any ideas for how to cut corners on cpu? I have no extra graphics card or anything, would this be a good live mixing upgrade? What are the upgrade options for people doing live video mixing with jitter?
If someone can answer even one of these questions it'd be a huge help. I'm really trying to learn this completely on my own, and of course have questions..
#1 - you are going to want to learn how to use openGL with jitter ASAP to increase your framerate. It makes a HUGE difference.
See the tutorials and check out my optimization patches here:
#2 - Midi takes little overhead compared to the video processing. I would not worry about it, unless you are dynamically updating LOTS of GUi objects at the same time. Thats a bit of a 'no no' in Max/MSP performance wise with video.
Check out the patches and the post to learn why, and rush to OpenGL, its a bit of a learning curve, but it will make ALL the difference speed wise.