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

perhaps attaching a click track to the movie's audio channel, then routing the channel into pd through Jack or some similar situation? Or, if you don't want a pulse but rather an absolute position, you might attach an ascending sine sweep to the audio track. begin at 100 hz at the eginning of the movie, 22.05 khz at the end. you could analyze the position with fiddle~ then. cpu heavy solution, perhaps. You could do one on either channel of film audio in fact, and have it both ways.

Both my suggestions boil down to the same idea- using the synced audio from the movie, rather than the movie itself. If you still need stereo sound from the video, load that into PD and play it to the audio sync.

hey sunji,

very good idea, i think i will try to make a quicktime with 5 (or 3) channel audio, 4 (2) tracks of on location sound and one smpte timecode track - can PD decode this? ... still i think it would be good to have a failsafe setup, so maybe one computer should play only the movie and the corresponding sound and another should deal with all the pd stuff. so if pd crashes it would still be possible to watch the movie. this would involve extra audio hardware inputs for the PD machine plus possible latency problems etc. but of course it would be desirable to have control over effects and possible mashups in PD using the original sound as the source...
And: i am currently working in windows, i have a dual-boot ubuntu on the machine but all my editing tools are windows only so i have to check what similar solutions to Jack exist in windows.

Thanks so far, i will report whats happening with the project.

till

I don't know windows very well, but I do know that if you're using ubuntu, and you run blackbox or fluxbox instead of gnome or kde, you can significantly lower your latency and reduce the risk of crashing.

Keep an ear to ubuntustudio.org, too. Now they are focusing on a distro of their own, but they had been working (check the archives) on making standard ubuntu into a mean dsp machine.