Hi all,
I´m pretty new to the whole visual thing, so please forgive any ignorance on my side ;). I´m coming from a music production background (hobby) and have some years experience with Cubase, MIDI, synths etc. I also have some experience in electronics and want to learn more out of cusiosity.
However, I stumbled across some videos from club watergate in Berlin, like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM4MPP_nPEA . And now I want that in my livingroom. It may be a long term project, I know, not easy, not cheap, but I did other long term things already :D.
My idea so far :
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Build a DMX-to-LED circuit based on a PIC microcontroller. This should be modular, so I can start with el cheapo low power LEDs and just plug in transistors and hi power LEDs if everything works as expected. Trying to learn some more electronics and assembler + C as a side effect.
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Use a number of these LEDs to build a matrix, something like 10x10 for starters, then 15x30 or a little more. But not something like 320x240… As a proof of concept prototype, the 10x10 may just sit on my table, but the goal is to have a living livingroom, i.e ceiling + maybe one wall (15x30 + 15x10) … That´s why I´d like to integrate some overhead right from the beginning, i.e. going Art-net to DMX, so there is no limit to 170 LEDs (512 channels). I may go for some other protocol, but if I ever want to put in a strobe or some other lighting gear, DMX opens worlds here. So I guess this is the best choice ?
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Now this is where I´m still struggling: How to generate and synchronize the patterns. Unlike a club like watergate, I don´t only want audio-to-visuals, but I´d like to hook this up to MIDI / Cubase as well, so I get nice illumination while producing. Could be simple as controlling colors by MIDI CC, but I think about lights snyced to MIDI Clock - just like the LFOs for a synth filter can sync to quarters etc. Triggering objects from within Cubase would be nice, too, like have a 4/4 base drum trigger a blob of 3x3 red pixels that bounce to a different position each time there is a kick drum MIDI ON etc.
And now there are my questions :
Can vvvv do something like this ? (Guess so)
What about timing, latency etc ? What refresh rates are normally used with a LED-matrix ? 25 fps ? more ?
Will it run smoothly on an average PC (not necessarily the same one I use for MIDI and audio) ? Or do I need a quadcore monster for that ?
Thinking about generating visuals : MIDI was my first idea, but resampling video (32ßx240 or 640x480) to 15x30 may give interesting effects too. I also think about creating lowres content in 3dsmax or flash, then trigger these sequences from resolume or arkaos (but maybe I can do it with vvvv as well ?), layer them, etc, then send them to the LED-matrix. Maybe even milkdrop from winamp and then somehow reroute the output to vvvv and finally the LED matrix ?
Or is vvvv the one man show that can do all this in a single app ?
I hope you got the idea what I´m looking for and I hope, too, that I don´t sound too stupid, I just know vvvv for some days now :). So if you have comments, ideas, links, tutorials - or if you know that things are simply impossible yet, please let me know.
Best wishes,
ol!ver