Change of plan

After much lengthy wrangling with Max/MSP/Jitter, it looks like a change of strategy needs to be put in place. The most useful aspect of Jitter is that its powerful video processing objects can be controlled live, and externally, using a variety of controllers and inputs. The particular aesthetic of the piece we are trying to make uses lots of composite images layered together on a single frame of moving image. While Jitter is excellent at producing video effects and transitions, it seems that compositing more than two sources of video is an extremely difficult task. The first problem is managing the program flow, something that is straightforward in most ‘code’ based packages. In Max, the flow of events is very difficult to manage, with various matrix objects requiring bangs to output, and various other input objects also requiring bangs at different times. With just two inputs, flickering images have been the result (and I don’t understand how the jit.qball object works).

The result of this is that we are going to resort to using Director to composite the assets and live video, but I am hopeful that we can still take external input from the existing sources (Processing running Carnivore; amplitude input from Max/MSP; and rotary switch input from the iCube) by using OSC to get everything to communicate. Not having used OSC before, I am expecting a few bumps, but the priority is that there is something to see next Wednesday or before, and as such I will be prioritising the construction of the screen based piece before getting it to communicate with external inputs.