Hi,

i am completely new to PD but before i really get into it i need to do some basic research...

i am looking into the possibility of performing a live score for my diploma movie (~60min) . we did some experiments hooking up the (SMPTE) timecode out of an analog betaSP VTR to a "motu midi timepiece" converting it to mtc and then going into max / msp of my friends powerbook. this approach is easy, failsafe and it works but as i am not a student anymore it is practically impossible to access a betacam player for this purpose - so i'd rather use a software-only solution, which could be distributed on more than one computer, if necessary, though.

when i tried to load my 60 min movie with pix_film (or pix_movie whatever it is called) PD crashed immediately, i bet it is trying to load the whole movie into RAM, which is not possible, even with the "small" DV compressed version. we would even prefer a DVCPro HD compressed movie which would be much bigger than the DV version. i was looking for a movie player which can be controlled by OSC but didnt find anything. in a "perfect" projection environment i would like to project the movie using an HD video projector.

the other question is, that unlike most video projections for media arts, i need to have the whole setup perfectly in sync, as i would play at least 2 tracks (rather 4) of direct location sound along the movie, which has to stay in lip-sync for 60 minutes.

furthermore, i was looking into a scoring interface like OTL to have a graphical score for the movie, controlling certain dramatical parameters automatically.

can anyone give an me advise if the idea for a setup like this is theoretically possible to realize or should i quickly forget about it ?

thanks in advance,
till

Thanks Obiwannabe,

I'll agree that there is probably a cultural chasm I am trying to look across,..

... but not on account of the tools and practices having not come *to* us.

I think the issue at our end is more that the tools and practices have not sprung *from* us.

For example, I've been networking e-Creative Practitioners of all sorts all across the world for some years now, and so, I've been lucky enough to be able to predict when several individual practices were to spill into the domain of *public practices*.

And so I did with music too,.. but without a clue to the decimation we saw over the past few years. As you say, it "has basically killed off a generation of really creative musicians and producers".

In fact, I know of at least two large TV-production houses here in India who've entirely dispensed with professional musicians, by just bumping 1-2 junior executives into learning Reason and/or FruityLoops,.. as an additional skill. Meanwhile, some others now offer external professionals as little as $50-100 for original jingles and programme ids.

And that really hurt for a guy like me, who had always held that music would be one of the last primary creative skills to fall into the domain of public practices, because a very-very special spark is needed to drive every good musician.

So, it was a reeeeeaaal pleasure for me to begin to learn, earlier this year (mainly from Lawrence Casserley), that what had actually happened to the cutting-edge of music and creative-audio was that it was entirely elsewhere!

But music is not my primary preoccupation, so I've been slow about expanding my comprehension of what is happening with Max & Pd and so on, while my developing actual skills lags even further behind.

And yes, I am also conscious that all of this is so new and so 'foreign' to so many of us, that we all also run the risk of falling into the same old traps of fascination and infatuation that have always yielded and also legitimized so much nonsense from every new medium in its infancy.

To cap that, I also do believe that the old need not always give way entirely to the new ~ by which I mean that surely good evolution ideally carries goodies forward.

For example, if I apply a parallel delay to the live-performance of a guitarist in realtime, it can be said that his performance itself might be carried forward by this technological empowerment. However, if I first *record* just an audio-slice of the guitarist and then play that back with a delay, whether alongside his ongoing performance or otherwise, then that can surely be seen to be the genesis of something else altogether.

Which brings me back to my original question ~ probably grounded in ignorance or perhaps just a quest for oversimplifaction.

"Why does not a patch as follows:

[adc~]
/ \
/ [Delay 500]
/ /
[dac~]

simply yield a realtime signal at left along with a delayed signal at right?"

I know it sounds stupid, but after all, why not?

Keep well ~ Shankar

Hi,

I'm just getting started with Pd on Fedora Core 3; installation was pretty painless thanks to the CCRMA repositories, but I've run into an issue when I first tried to make some sounds with Pd. I recreated Miller Puckette's example of a constant amplitude scaler. When I start the audio, the signal seems to take a few seconds to 'settle' into a constant frequency; I get a few seconds of static that eventually turns into the sine wave I was expecting. When I click the DIO errors button, I get a bunch of A/D/A sync errors, as follows:

audio I/O error history:
seconds ago error type
0.73 A/D/A sync
0.73 A/D/A sync
0.75 A/D/A sync
0.94 A/D/A sync
0.94 A/D/A sync
0.95 A/D/A sync
1.01 A/D/A sync
1.01 A/D/A sync
1.10 A/D/A sync
1.10 A/D/A sync
1.11 A/D/A sync
1.11 A/D/A sync
1.17 A/D/A sync
1.17 A/D/A sync
1.17 A/D/A sync
1.17 A/D/A sync
1.27 A/D/A sync
1.31 A/D/A sync
1.31 A/D/A sync
1.36 A/D/A sync

If I let the steady sine wave tone continue, eventually there's a bit of a 'hiccup' in the sound, and then I get the following errors:

audio I/O error history:
seconds ago error type
1.25 DAC blocked
1.25 data late
1.25 data late
1.25 data late
1.25 data late
1.25 data late
1.25 data late
1.25 data late
1.25 data late
1.25 data late
1.25 data late
1.25 data late
1.25 data late
1.25 data late
1.25 data late
1.25 data late
1.25 data late
1.25 data late
1.25 data late
1.25 data late

Can anyone help me out in diagnosing this problem and fixing it? Where should I start looking to fix this?

Thanks!