hey all,

i'm no expert at all in pd or MIDI protocol, but i've got an issue here that i believe pd could solve.

i have a project in which an operator is controlling different audio tracks in a timeline using nuendo (http://www.steinberg.net/en/products/audiopostproduction_product/nuendo4.html), which is installed in a windows laptop. there's a MIDI interface Cakewalk UM-1G (http://www.cakewalk.com/products/hardware/default.aspx?Prod=UM-1G) that connects the nuendo laptop with a macbook pro, which we initially had modul8 running. the purpose of this setup is to control the videos in the macbook using MIDI messages shot by the nuendo timeline in another computer.

what i would like to know is if pd offers a viable solution to this issue. could i use pd to manage the videos using MIDI messages. one detail: the messages should carry timecode information, so that the operator can control video timing (speed up or slow down).

was i clear? appreciate any help, thanks!

You could define your own protocol on top of MIDI (eg, using combinations of Control Change messages to set speed or effects settings or anything you can think of...) - I don't think there is any easy to use MTC or whatever in Pd, judging from the repeated questions on the Pd mailing list. If you send the frame number you'd need 2 or 3 controller numbers as they're only 7bit, depending on the length of the timeline... and this wouldn't be too easy for the operator to use I imagine.

I think HCS was working on something related to video/timeline stuff, more for soundtrack stuff as pure-data/externals/framesync/README.txt says:

framesync is a library for syncing sounds to video using frame numbers as the
unit of time. It was developed as part of the sound design for the Cartier
Foundation's Terre Natale project. There are a couple of concepts in this
library necessary to understand in order to use it:

• the FPS (Frames-Per-Second) is a global value set everywhere in Pd
• the frameclock is global, and each framesync object receives it automatically
• the frameclock starts at 0 and flows linearly

hey claudius, thanks for your reply,

i checked with the guys that are working w/me in this project, we are actually not going to need a timecode control. we just need to send a 'play' message via MIDI to pd, that would play a specific video from a folder, once the timeline in Nuendo sends the message. i guess that makes it easier, right?

would it be better to convert MIDI to OSC using, say, osculator?

i will look into the control change messages though.

thanks!