the ease and painless 60fps of this blew my mind. Happily rendering 9600x1080 and handing this over to james’s openframeworks edge-blending dome warper via syphon. it’s not often i can show what lies underneath!
i was happy to talk about it, i really like the mix of cocoa for the app, OpenGL + QCRenderer for the rendering engine and Quartz Composer.app to visually patch each client’s bespoke design and animation together. well, i was impressed it wasn’t long before screenrunner was running on the dome’s mac pro, and not long after that james was organising a creative coding night in their mini demo dome.Īs part of that he invited the london quartz composer group along, and invited me to show what quartz composer was doing in screenrunner. James sheridan saw SPK-RectPack, and invited me to see the dome setup he develops the tech for: igloo, the company, could do with something like screenrunner running in the dome, and more generally james is a creative-coding guy keen to meet like-minds.
↩︎įirst use of which was this: a bright spring day spent in a dark concrete cellar… ↩︎ Its noisy fan and bulky power supply, less so. usr/local/bin/vqscmd -DeviceNumber=0 -Commit usr/local/bin/vqscmd -DeviceNumber=0 -CaptureRegionDefault=0 usr/local/bin/vqscmd -DeviceNumber=0 -OutputSource=1
#!/bin/shĮcho '# Datapath X4 Configuration for *spark d-fuser'Įcho 'Error: Missing Mac OSX software for X4'Įcho 'Setting input format to 2048x1536 30Hz' I didn’t see many config scripts for the X4 when i wrote my first, so here’s the configure script from the zip in plain, google-searchable, text. Spark D-Fuser X4 4x1 to 2x2 Pixel Map.qtz Spark dfuser - datapath X4 configure script Windows CorioTools SPK-DF-750 v423 with X4.zip _See support site for firmware v30 and above_ So - attached is a zip of files with the resources you need to configure through your d-fuser and to 4x through the X4.
it’s not quite ready for yet - it involves a windows pc, amongst other things - but the process works, and i’ve even got a nice align grid and 4x1 to 2x2 pixel map and test movie rolled in there.
having just stepped through the process for the guildhall school of music and drama’s purchase of two d-fusers and an X4 for their scenography work, i’ve packaged up and made good the resources necessary. of course, this has all happened since the firmware was commissioned and plans went to the factory, so the retail units don’t ship with this support. It was a while until we got our hands on one at d-fuse HQ, but we did, and now the d-fuser can work with one too. before even getting to running quad-head, you could take triplehead input, split that to three outputs, and then use the forth to scale that non-standard 12x3 input back to something you could display on a monitor on your desk. still, surprisingly affordable for what you get, which is a 1-in, 4-out dual-link dvi box where each output is completely configurable. it’s a triplehead2go on steroids, coming from the pro-av market rather than gamers. Then in 2011, the datapath X4 was released. it was a direct need for d-fuse’s live shows, along with HD.
the audio side has a long way to go: elastic audio, setting bpm from a column trigger, pre-fade / post-fade effect processing.īack in 2009, the d-fuser was conceived to mix ‘triplehead’ dvi. it’s great that’s possible – to the extent i was able to make my own render stack fed by the individual layers in resolume – but not all of it was me being fussy.
but, i needed to ‘outboard’ quite a lot of functionality. Turns out, resolume does make this possible, and it’s great to perform from just one software. i wondered whether there might be a simpler way, now that resolume avenue effectively had ableton’s session view – in which rbn_esc’s basic structure and audio-visual links are laid out – and was built to be an audio-visual software from the ground up.
but there was a lot to that integration, and my license of ableton live was long expired.
Being asked to revive rbn_esc begged the question: will the software still run, can i even remember how to handle the complexity? it was an amazing milestone back in 2006 going from two laptops linked by midi to running the complete performance off one laptop.