Slashdot Mirror
Video Scratching Goes Mainstream
Boomzilla writes "Pioneer has released
a digital
audio and video turntable (the DVJ-X1), which allows you to manipulate and
playback synchronized digital audio and video. You can manipulate DVD visuals in
the same way as you would music i.e. real-time digital video scratches, loops
and instant cues. The video and audio streams will stay in sync, even when
they're being reversed and pitched. I guess this is the logical, commercialized
version of that which has been
done before.
It's being
shown at CES, and there are several pictures on the official Pioneer site."
You are very good.. at turning me on
HOW'S MY POSTING? CALL 1-800-POSTING
This THING is enough to get any geek laid!!..
Just imagine walking in to a Club with this. Even if you have hardly an inch on your face with out a pimple, you will still get laid...
Rapid Nirvana
How big of a buffer does this thing have? If this thing uses DVDs for a turntable, then it must mean it has over 5GB of RAM to get around the lag of spinning the disk to find the part of the video.
Unless, of course, it only goes over the span of a few seconds, but since video/audio streams take up a ton of data, then it must have something like 512MB of ram built in to do it.
That, plus they have to find a way to capture the results of the delta frames, or else they're going to have artifacts.
Pretty amazing stuff.
We could already do basically the same kind of thing with iMovie, although with more of a workspace interface, but it was still nice and cheap.
Still, a scrub machine for the masses. Could make for some interesting deejay team competitions; visuals used to be automated. It's nice to see a more hands-on approach to a technology we've otherwise left to the A/V club geeks.
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
Scratching and looping? Sounds exactly like "Max Headroom" from the early 80s!
Not only has he already re-edited his own stuff, imagine what he can do with DVD's of other people's movies!!! He'll frickin' P-Diddy his way back into the mainstream with remixes of The Sound of Music, Casablanca, and The Godfather.
It's not copyright infringement, it's sampling!!! Now a "meesa jar jar binks" is just about the same as an "uh huh yeah!"
I like the Final Scratch approach. Just put a dummy encoded record on the turntable and then map any content (mp3) to it spatially. the perfect input device.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
At least for my porn collection!
This thing looks awesome, any DJ would be drooling at the mouth over it. It gives them a chance to mix visuals as well as their turntabling. With a huge screen behind you and one of these babies you could mix your viinyl with some visuals. Its great to finally get something that is so hands on with video.
Hmm...
It has RAM, and a DVD drive. Therefore, it can be made to run Linux!
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Although I would love it to be cool video remix is just not that cool looking. People have been doing this for a long time with various systems and I have seen quite a few of them. I used to work for MTV back when they had a techno show (AMP) and they tried to mix video but it just didn't work. There was no way to match rythm and even if you could it just didn't look particularly intereting. It seemded like it would be cool and you wantedted it to be but it ended up have only slightly more novelty than Microsoft's clippy. I have also seen a few groups that tried it with more advance equipment in more recent years and it mad for a nice compliment to a music DJ but these guys used a bunch of short weird and distorted clips mixed with CG. It was cool but no one person could have done it. I am also not so sure scratching would go too well either. Mostly because one of the things about scratching is that music scratching is done by going back and forth over a sound thus creating a NEW rythm and tone. However, picturing someone going back and forth over video clips just conjures silly images that I would imagine could even be a little dizzying to watch. So while they might of solved some techinical hurdles I think the artistic side has a long way to come.
In the early days (the really early ones), manipulating text easily was a challenge for computers. Then images and sound were the next hurdle. Compression schemes were not standard and memory limitations limited the kind of things that could be done and prevented realtime editing. I have long been wondering when video will reach the stage that sound and image are in now. I didnt think it was any time soon, but apparently DVDs/mpeg2 allow some semblance of this realtime, free-form editing possible for the other medias. Now what really interests me is, what is next for computers to conquer (and yes i know video is hardly conquered yet)? 3d video? (and i dont mean stereo, i mean 3d recordings of entire rooms or people ie scifi "holo" displays) or is there something even more amazing that i cant think of...
I'm not sure that the points that it makes sense to scratch audio at are appropriate for video wobbling at the same place. Most of the cool (coldcut etc.) previous stuff that people are mentioning, was small bits of video triggered rather than wobbling.
;).
Woudln't mind a play though
I'm interested to see if they come out with a mixer to support it.
Actually I've found that doing porn really tends to not go over so well with most crowds. Instead I use a lot of kung-fu, anime, war shots, and old black and white films. Nuclear weapons test footage also works well. I add to that custom 3D renders and live effects, and get a show that most people like. I tend to do this while I am mixing live and let Geiss's Milkdrop run when I'm taking a break =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
A little history for you electronic arts folks who dig this stuff:
I did this same thing in 1989 using a Roland Alpha portable keyboard and MAX running on a Mac 2. Max was a great program for the Mac that let you graphically build a control system for any peripherals (almost like Labworks for MIDI/Appletalk). The scripte we wrote could queue video sequences by pressing a piano key, and you could scratch using the pitch wheel, turning it into a video jog wheel.
During the performance, three musicians would jam on midi instruments (drums, roland wind thingy and a guitar synth) and another program on MAX would improvise based on what we were playing. The video artist also stood on stage with the ROland Alpha, jamming with us and using a small monitor rather than facing the projection screen.
Technologically, it was HOT.
In practice, the music was a cacophony and the video didn't change fast enough to keep up.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
-until the image of an actor could be digitally sampled and then cast in a new movie? Like the commercials that use licensed images of Elvis or Humphrey Bogart to advertise contemporary products but an entire feature using a sampled image of Bogie that cannot be distinguished from images made from the actor. I see a whole new area of licensing and intellectual property battles. Then again, I'd love a chance to redo Star Wars Episode 1. The story just cries out for new casting. At least erase Jar Jar.
I'm laughing at clouds.
From the wired article:
Video scratching was pioneered by a U.S. multimedia crew called Emergency Broadcast Network in the late 1980s, and refined by Coldcut and Hex, a pair of U.K. collaborative multimedia producers and musicians.
Does anyone else remember EBN? They were sorta Negativland-ish music (later Negativland, that is... dispepsi-ish stuff that had a beat and wasn't as abstract as their earlier stuff) and had all these cool videos where they did video sampling.
Their live show was one of the coolest I've ever seen. They had three huge video screens behind the stage playing sampled video, and this this weird podium thing that had two arms... On the front of the arms were TVs with yet more sampled video, and then later in the show, they arms spun around and had lasers or something on the other side. This was a long time ago, so I don't remember exactly, but it was incredibly impressive. They had re-edited all this footage, so they had Connie Chung, Dan Rather, et al. saying "This is EBN Nightly News!" and stuff. They also had a real gun shooting blanks during "Shoot the Mac 10". I grabbed some of the bullets of the stage, and I think I still have them. Amazingly, they were just the opening act for Banco de Gaia, who I also like, but come on... Toby Marks (BdG) was just sitting at a mixing board. It didn't even compare.
You can find some of their videos around the net. We Will Rock You shows them re-working (elder) Bush speeches, similar to the Bushwhacked that's been floating around the net.
They also had this tricked out station wagon with a satellite dish and video monitors all up and down the roof. It looked pretty cool, though I only saw pictures, not the real thing.
Later I saw them in "concert" opening for someone else, and they just played a video. I don't even think there was anyone from EBN there. It was totally disappointing.
Coldcut and Hex are cool, too, but I've never seen a show like the EBN one since.
I've played with more than a few VeeJays in my time, there seems to be a huge range in the effort that the video people put in - some of them try to sync stuff up to the music, others just plug up a DVD player and let whatever they have play - usually hentai porn. Really the audio needs to be syncrhonised to the music activity.
n eeds the XviD codec)
I've been messing around with video for a long time, but I'm still really a DJ at heart, I figure that a good audio video show needs at least 2 people with one DJ + One Video performer. The DJ needs a mixer which can send MIDI events from it's knobs and faders allwing the videographer to slave effects and synchronise them to what the DJ is doing. Problem is any mixer which sends midi events is just plain lousy for DJ'ing right now.
Anyway, I figured that most Promoters these days just don't listen to mix CD's for very long, so I've started to work on the video approach to complement my demo packs - here's a little one I'm working on right now.
http://www.radiodmz.com/radiodmz_trailer.avi
(
2 minutes of fast mixing and video effects - more of a commercial than a demo, but it's definately a step up from teh average video artist who plays Hentai porn over my DJ sets.....
A couple of years ago a friend of mine went to a weird multimedia show at a club where they hung sheets up on the wall and did live video/music mixing. He bought their CD which had video mixes on it for about half the songs, I think.
Anyway they were called Emergency Broadcast Network. The album was Telecommunications Breakdown and it used clips from news broadcasts and infomercials. There's a very small clip from one of the songs one that album here. There also some better resolution clips of some of their other songs here, and a better resolution download of "Rock This Base" here. I don't think any of those sons are as good as the stuff on Telecommunications Breakdown, but check it out, I'm not sure if that album is still available anywhere right now.
Yeah, EBN were an amazing band pioneering all this kind of stuff, and still going sadly unrecognised to this day ( tip: Telecommunications Breakdown is probably one of the best albums of the 90's, and had all this k00l multimedia shit bundled with it too ).
The swinging apparatus you described was also at some points mounted on the station wagon - it can be seen configured like this in the documentary Sonic Outlaws, which is awesome, and first turned me on to EBN, Negativland and that style of music in general. Anyone with an interest in fair use rights should view this documentary, as it features extensive coverage of the Island Records / Negativland lawsuit.
YLFIP.S. Am very jealous you were lucky enough to see them live.
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
Let's see... LP's operate at 33.3 RPM.
:-)
DVD's rotate at 1400+ RPM.
I can picture earnest, stern-faced VJ's sucking on burnt fingertips.
ok :)) ;)
its dj Q-bert not Quick, the rooster not the bunny, and he is considered the best DJ in the world which, when you know about is career, is very hard to argue with.
Wavetwister was entirely made out of skratches, the sounds, soundtracks and dialogues, not the video, it is built like it but isn't. And, well, yeah, probably that being stoned would help endure it but even if I'm a skratch whore I didn't appreciate.
The fact that you know about this movie is interesting though, it's nice to see a non-skratcher being aware of it...
I was bored one night when I was on the road in San Franciso, and I noticed that the Mozilla first anniversary party was happening at the Sound Factory. It was fairly ho-hum, but there I witnessed EBN. It (they?) was awesome. Very cool and innovative.. I'll have to get a DVD of one of their performances...
I bought MS Pinky to use with my MOTU 828mkII firewire audio interface instead of Final Scratch. The software was $100 with the vinyl, and I didn't have to waste money on the Scratch Amp thing that is only good for Final Scratch. It is great! 10ms Latency on a G3 iBook, and much better quality than Final Scratch.
Oh yeah, it came with a program that does video scratching as well.
Check it out! If you already have a 4 input-channel soundcard, you only need to spend $100!
Wave Twisters isn't all skratching if you want to get technical about it. Quite a few of the beats were produced (i.e. some by Mix Master Mike). Now for a purely skratch album check out: D-Styles Phantazmagoria. Everything was done live. You can check it out here: http://www.djdstyles.com/.
For other discussions on skratching there are a few message boards floating around, namely the dstyles board, also www.asisphonics.net which is a great site that caters towards skratch djs, as well as http://www.styluswars.com/.
Oh yeah, for another cool turntable instrument, check out the QFO, Qbert's turntable with a built in mixer. Here's a link for that: http://nerdgod.org/vestax-qfo
Why?
Honestly, I don't think there is a great enough market for this sort of thing. I always imagined a live performing artist with gear sending MIDI->DMX (DMX is a digital light control system) to sync the lights in a club/venue to the music, but it seems to me that taking DVDs (even custom ones) and scratching them wouldn't be all that cool, as least not cool enough that someone is gonna buy this. It feels like a gimmick is all.
Can anyone point me to a video of someone actually doing something like mixing video clips like this? Besides that VDJ software that Coldcut tried to market back in the day...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?