Our good friend Deep Visual has provided some answers to many a modul8 users deepest desires. If you are not familiar with his previous efforts I recommend you have a look at his other related tutorials that we here and Modul8 often refer our users to watch.
What’s more you can read for yourself how the resulting demo came to be. Big thanks to module making talents of modul8 user Anome of Iduun for cooking up a much needed tool for setting up layers with pixel point precision.
About a week ago modul8 user Richard Boarse sent an email with his crafty method of broadcasting the modul8 output to Skype using a software called CamcamX.
He has already made a post about it on the forums but I felt the need to have this on the blog for people who are less likely to dive in there.
Modul8 through grabber raster to camcamX to skype:
Camera feed through modul8 to grabber raster and from leopard i-sight to CamcamX:
QT feed through modul8 to grabber raster and leopard i-sight to camcamX:
QT feed and VCR-DV mixed in modul8- threaded through raster grabber and mixed with leopard i-sight cam in camcamX:
The whole shebang – fully functional Modul8 feed through Skype!
I asked Richard what the motivation was for finding a solution to broadcasting modul8 into Skype.
“I live in Paris, and I’m working on an editing project at the moment,
editing a film for a director who’s working in Berlin.
I need to show her the work I’ve done on the edit everyday, which
means exporting the file, uploading it to an FTP with a timecode, and
then waiting whilst she goes over it to check it.”
“The grabber raster workaround means that I don’t have to do that,
because I can narrowcast it on skype direct to her, and we can talk
over the edit live – but its clunky.”
“This is a real world practical example of why I need to use this kind
of technology today, but there are a few more points which I’d include
on my list of personal reasons.”
“Most of my VJ friends live and run events in Tokyo, – I want to play
there remotely from Paris, and this kind of technology helps me to do
it. If I want to broadcast to a circle of acquaintances, or to a channel,
providing a ‘feed’ from modul8, so that a program like skype or
justin.tv can pick it up, this seems like a simple and effective
solution, without having to build in a separate VJ broadcast peer-to-
peer module.”
The key here is immediacy. Personally I could not see myself remote VJ’ing. The energy of the crowd and the rumbling of the sound system. That aside it is interesting to see modul8 is becoming more and more a part of video production where immediacy is necessity that breeds innovation.
With the release of version 2.5.5 of modul8 several new keywords have been added.
One of them that I am eager to write about is the ‘direct_media_change’ keyword that allows for management of media such as adding, moving or removing media from the media set.
Wasting no time module master Gael Abegg Gauthey of Vision Sonore who brought us the legendary (vs) Sequencer jumped into action during the beta phase of v.2.5.5 and created (vs) Clear Mediaset (all). It allows for clearing the whole media set (oooh… harsh) or each media set.
Lets see if anyone can outdo him by by creating tabs of each media set with a grid of 16 check boxes in each one so that media can be deleted selectively. Ooooooh. Anyone?