I gonna be using flash as3.0 to do the majority of the work, I think with the new H.264 decoding possibilities and the release of flash "Square" which has 64bit support there's allot of room to develop something that has excellent performance. Flex also provides many opportunities for rapid prototype development and its where I feel most at home :)
So far I've found out that clip navigation is an important factor. I think that this is a great area for development, and id would like to implement some kind of adaptive interface which allows the user to search the file system for clips and narrows the results as you type in more of the search term. Obviously this is a technique being employed on the web more and more with AJAX technology. Do you think that this, with the combination of Decks of clips would provide a more usable system (obviously deck based storage is used allot already)?
a couple of thoughts on features so far have been:
Reactive Filters:
Allowing filter parameters to be adjusted based on the volume level of certain frequency bands: i.e. a blur filter of which the blur increases with the bass (I'm not sure as to whether something like this has already been implemented on a system).
Modular Filter racks:
Allowing the user to build modules which can combine filters in parallel or series to create interesting effects.
Intelligent Interface:
Some kind of adaptive control which provides easy access to the most commonly used commands (although I am concerned that this will lead the user into repeating the same tasks over and over which isn't conducive to creative experimentation).
Automation:
I'm not sure if this is employed already on allot of systems but in music production you can easily automate effect parameters visually through the timeline, do you think this would be useful?
These are just some of my thoughts, I come from a photography/graphic design/music background but over the last few years my bread and butter has been application/web design. I am not a VJ so any help you could provide would be much appreciated. I want to provide a tool which is free/open source which really allows the user to focus on getting creative. I'm also really interested in how system usability influences the creative process so this is what will drive the majority of my research and testing.
Cheers,
Jon
Hi Pastey
hmm that's kind of really big goal ;)
first of all, before you start checkout existing flash mixers:
http://flxer.net
http://www.onyx-vj.com/
http://flashmixer.de
there are as well some projects which are not public like:
http://flashmixer.de/
Coo by Lukas Vojir
and mutevj which seems to be abandoned
http://www.mutevj.com/ (site is down)
as I understood you plan to develop it as a stand-alone flash application, so the first biggest problem which you gonna approach is performance. Forget HD resolution - try to chroma mix two clips with blur on them and you will understand why, I don't think that "square" will solve something, unless they will introduce proper openGL hardware support (which they will not as far as I know).
second problem is: midi / osc / external communication - getting this done is pain in the ass, as the only way to receive those signals is to use sockets, and that means you have to setup socket server. Not the most straight forward way to work.
third problem: microphone (reactive filters) - most of vjs don't really use it as it's not reliable, but anyway in flash you cannot use computespectrum on this object, only activitylevel, which actually is mystery what really states for. So I'm not sure if you can extract frequency bands from it.
fourth problerm is: forget freeframe support
and so on so on...
my overall point is:
your ideas of usability and focusing on interface are really interesting, however...
...getting vj software done in as3 is not an easy task, as flash platform has a lot of limitations. Because of those limits flash based mixers are not widely used.
if you are still up to do it (fingers crossed), good luck and come along to the meeting to get the feedback to your ideas - usually there is plenty of developers around.
