Experimental Performance Device

Vidget 3.5 is an experimental interactive audiovisual performance device which allows the user to manipulate video in real time online. As well as mixing a number of video clips together, the user may search for still images from the Flickr photo sharing site and mix them together. [via unmediated]

“…this version (Vidget 3.5) follows on from previous versions: Vidget 1; Flickr Image Viewer (Vidget 2); and Vidget 3…For instructions on Vidget 3.5 usage, see previous versions above.

Notes:

The main feature which has been fixed is the Flickr image search function. Over the last few weeks flickr.com (a very cool photo sharing site) has been changing the way they format their RSS feeds which means previous vidgets are broken. Things seem to have settled down now after a brief period of including ‘enclosure’ tags in their feeds I am back to parsing information from the ‘description’ tags for each image.

I am also back to using separate movies for the controls and output of the vidget. This improves the performance greatly as the output movie (which composites up to 3 source movies over the top of each other in real time) is rendered at 320*240 and may be increased to 640*480 by viewing at ‘double size’ in the Quicktime Player. I was having a lot of problems with sending the url of each of the ’source’ movies from the controller movie to the output movie to be loaded. The solution was to have the output movie effectively ‘ask’ for the url via a custom event.

The controller movie now finds the url of the selected source movie (from either the xml file which lists the names of my clips or the Flickr RSS search response), sets it as a ’string variable’ and then executes a custom event in the output movie which reads the ’string variable’ back from the controller movie. The same process applies to tell the output movie which Movie In A Movie track to load the clip into.

Here’s a bit of the LiveStage Pro Qscript for the controller movie:

SetStringVariable(1, channel)

SetStringVariable(2, bignumber)
SetStringVariable(4, movpath)

MovieOfID(12345).TrackNamed(”Untitled Sprite”).SpriteOfID(1).ExecuteEvent(42684)

The output movie then executes an event which gets these variables and sets them as ‘Movie Variables’:

SetString(channel, MovieOfID(838482).GetVariable(1))
SetString(bignumber, MovieOfID(838482).GetVariable(2))
SetString(movpath, MovieOfID(838482).GetVariable(4))

TrackNamed(channel).AddChildMovie(bignumber, movpath)
TrackNamed(channel).LoadChildMovie(bignumber)

Livestage Pro source files: Controller, Output”

Blogged by David Wolf