Final Cut – first time out for PatchBox v2
So last night I slung the bags of gear over my shoulders and headed down to the Komedia to do visuals for Final Cut.
There’s nothing quite like jumping in to a new event, in a new
venue, with a software program that’s never been tested publicly
before, and doing an hour of completely improvised visuals in front of
a room full of strangers (many of whom where film makers) to really get
the concentration focussed!
Technically it performed pretty
well. Lots of video clips, FreeFrame effects, LUA scripts, all being
fed into a GLSL shader. I kept vertical sync on, just for safety, and
it seemed quite happy purring along at 30fps @ 1024×768.
It did crash the once but fortunately just as I was fading out anyway!
What
rapidly became apparent was the need to be able to get rapid access to
key features. I had to spend too long dragging and dropping, switching
between property pages, and entering values via the keyboard.
It’ll
be a priority to get MIDI support implemented as soon as possible,
which will help alleviate the value control situation dramatically.
However I was pleased on the whole. There’s obviously a couple of stability issues that need ironing out ASAP, and a fresh set of entries on the to-do list, but altogether a pretty successful first live test!
And they’ve asked me back to do next month, too: Sunday, February 17th.
Sadly didn’t manage to get any filming done this weekend. Think I’ll prepare some clips tonight and try and film the thing in action on Wednesday (am in London tomorrow afternoon/evening for a meeting about this year’s InTransit festival).
