Last week was a general assembly of the modul8 Team in sunny and fresh Geneva in our transitional offices/headquarters. An image above and below so show. It was pretty busy so hence no post. And that turned out to be a very good thing. Last week I was going to post ONE cool way to get a decent live feed signal going into modul8. Because the post got postponed (you can laugh now) I now have TWO cool ways to get a live feed into modul8.

Ok.

Capturing the screen as a DV signal over Firewire from Udart (Vibeke Bertelsen) on Vimeo

On the theme of the never ending ways people like to work with modul8 user Vibber (aka Udart) discovered a fun and cheap method for live screen capture of the desktop.
Not exactly very cheap. You still need a 2nd laptop. But I know quite a few people who do have 2nd laptop lying around (myself included) so something like this is not completely out of reach. For myself I am just thinking of being able to screen cast web content through to modul8 and then making custom content over it maybe?

It needs to be noted that Vibber has a damn fine blog to go and also finds time to make a useful module and then email me about all she has been up to. We love active members.

So you have this DV option with your second handy laptop but you’re really thinking ‘this image quality is kinda crappy… there must be a way to get higher quality video output from my laptop then just this bleeding 7 frame delay FireWire stuff!’

Plus you have a budget for a solution for this problem.

Enter vade…

Matrox MXO2-Mini review for VJs. Uncompressed HD mixing laptop to laptop. from vade on Vimeo

vade (aka Anton) go back to my early days at SHARE. While we both work in the same field we play very different parts within it. Clearly with his reputation of all sorts of mad coding he has the upper hand when it comes to pure geekery.

This is probably one of the best video demos I have ever seen. It was so good that my girlfriend and I watched it while we were eating lunch and had to stop eating because we were laughing so much. Some of it is a bit ‘evil’ but I won’t get into that. Just watch, enjoy and learn… how in reality stuff can be really frustrating even though you tested it several times before ‘the little red button’ gets pushed.

One of the things that he does not really talk about here is the possibility of being able to just record your output at high quality. This has been a question from the lips of quite a few video artists I have communicated with. With this solution… simply press the red button.