Like many of you I am in withdrawal at the moment from my LZX buying addiction. I stare at my video rack and cry uncontrollably. Even though I’ve never consumed an illicit drug in my life I actually tried to snort my Vidiot last night. Yes, it’s that bad! But don’t worry, I’m seeing my shrink at noon.
MESSAGE TO LARS:
Lars, you are my sensei master, controller of my destiny, the source of all color in my universe and my DEALER. I also know that you’re holding out on a sister. You certainly have a few modules from yesteryear that you could sell to an addict until she can get her next legitimate fix. I implore you to sell me ANYTHING you have. I can’t stop shaking and I tried sticking patch cables up my nose to cv control my eye sight. Pleassseee help me out. Just DM me. Any good dealer would help a sister out.
MESSAGE TO OTHER ADDICTS/DEALERS:
I implore you, if anyone is holding please let me know. I have the cash. You know I’m good for it. All I need is just a fix of Color Chords, Curtain, Doorway or even a Sudafed like the Prismatic Ray. I promise that I’m not a narc and won’t tell Lars or the community at large if you sell to me. I just need to get back to my life and the only solution is more glitch, more color and more melting CRT.
but sometimes you gotta cook your own in the bathroom of a walmart over the course of a 36h madness session in between terrorizing the skateboard bike secti0n and trying to find the freshest milk in the dairy case.
Fetishize acquisition less, fetishize exploitation of what you have more. Consumer capitalism dupes us into believing that acquisition is the solution for everything.
hydra is a great way to explore video synthesis concepts without having a system in front of you.
shape creation, feedback, digital noise, movement, kaleidoscopes/mirroring
There is a lot to learn!
For instance I wanted to see about how to do edge detection/hipass filtering within hydra which led me to experiment with offsetting a video X&Y then overlaying/subtracting back over itself and boom “edge detection” appears. It isn’t perfect but it is controllable in a fun and different way than traditional filtering. I presented the idea to the folks the work on the erogenous tones structure and soon it was a shader on their system.
Now I can apply that same idea to patching within the system.
ffmpeg is a workhorse of a program. I do all my scaling/padding/cropping/concating/gif’ing with ffmpeg. It also has many creative applications like displacement/morphing/bluring/slow down & speed up etc…
getting to know your post processing workflow is good when you have the time available.
this video is using ffmpeg to do some resolution post processing play on an older video synth output of ours. Again I brought up the specific workflow to the erogenous tones folks and they incorporated it as a shader into structure.
this is ffmpeg doing morphing. I love these videos and getting textures that are hard to find within the video system as it stands. This came about from just playing with ffmpeg.
have a look over the patch book we put together a while back. This can be a really powerful way to “interact” with modules that you don’t have and try to understand what they are for before buying them.
or better yet depending on what kind of video output you ultimately want to be making get any camera whose video you can or will be able to get into the system and start filming. I can’t say enough for how much filming feels like video synthesis to me now. We made a video sample pack a while back
if you haven’t also check out our meta video synth information post
We collected tons of information about a video system into one place.
So many of the questions I saw popping up over and over again are answered in that post.
in our vidicon presentation we focused on using physical objects to manipulate within a system. having something you can touch going into a video system makes a huge difference for interaction.
Remember video synthesis is about patience
this is and has always been our most important module
video synthesis is about learning
synthesis is about working with what you have
enjoy each step
G.A.S. is a hella of a drug. Gear Acquisition Syndrome is real and most fall into it’s trap. I’ve been there too. I think a key is learning what works for you, when you have enough, or when something doesn’t fit with your style and setup and selling it off. Finding a headspace where one decides I have enough, I need to focus on what I have and making things with what I have can be hard. But creation of refined artistic work should be the goal over acquisition in the long run. After my first two years of GAS and video synths I’ve gotten close to that point. But it’s going to flare up again when new things hit the market. Good luck!
I never knew what that acronym stood for, after several years of seeing it on MW and reddit. (I understood the context, just didn’t know what words the letters mapped to.) Now I know!
Hydra is super cool, especially because you can snag the generated GLSL from the dev console in chrome and throw it on Structure (with a few minor tweaks of course).
I deff need to spend some time with cables.gl I’m down with the nodes for sure! In love with Magic Music Visuals and TouchDesigner.
Also check out https://noisedeck.app/ for more browser based fun. I’ve been using the pro version live recently by capturing with OBS and spouting to reso. They have a desktop app version with a lot of cool features on the roadmap too.
Keep on exploring and your crave will be tamed - I have used only 3 modules (ramps, camera input, rgb encoder) for long months - with either my audio modular or very basic PD patches. There are always ways. Have you plugged video singals to any of your audio inputs? Have you fed back with stack cables on this or that input? I always find myself re-exploring stuff with modules I know to death.
I made these with a video osc, a ramp, a castle logic and a lot of feedback - I always come back to these whenever I complain that I’d need another one of this or that to convince myself that you do not need all that stuff to come up with something: https://www.instagram.com/p/By_CbU7hTYL/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BzLvKqrh4wD/
Have you looked for kits or other makers’ works? Reverse Landfill, Syntonie, BSO, Visible Signals have a lot of functionality covered by Expedition modules you are looking at. My next case will be probably filled some of their works too. As with audio modules, I really like exploring and creating everything from basic building blocks. Have you fed basic ramps through the camera input with either an Andor1 or some hdmi › AV conversion? Have you checked audio modules which have cool effects on video? (Wave mults and fuzzers are a good starting point). So many things to look at…
Or the external stuff - I am getting my 2nd TV tester for around 15usd worth of money here - I managed to get a beautiful video mixer used in our state TV broadcast for decades for a ridiculously cheap price… It has different colors than any LZX I have seen before. Cheers and enjoy the journey!
