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For the DataBEEZ chiptunes tour, north american demosceners blackpawn and guybrush made reactive/performance visuals with Processing. Pretty good for 3 weeks' fun hacking.

Most of what you see on the big screen is cued and triggered by either blackpawn or guybrush. You can see Fry's Treemap being used to convey frequency data, the only thing that is audio-driven. The rest (position, rotation, palette choice, layers, effects on-off, effect repeat interval, every time the spaceship gun fires, every single white flash :D ) is controlled live through either a korg/akai midi control device(thanks, midibus!) or an xbox joystick (thanks, procontroll!)

Live performance is really fun... and damned if hitting a god damned button isn't the most fun way to synch big white flashes to the beat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI2FHK33RGo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc3Pdlts-UY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snCgHWc74tI

Nice! Looks like a lot of fun. :) Do you have any more footage? This was inspiring. I used to run the light-rig at a local club before I started DJing, and that was killer fun. The strobe controller had a rotary-knob for the speed and an "ON/OFF"-switch - as far as I know, I was the only light-guy who manually beatmatched the strobe in that club. ;)

That's how I've been doing vj-synching since the first lazy sunday video session. (Game controllers in my case.. The PS2 one is pretty sweet, with its pressure sensitive buttons and multiple analog axes)

Doing synchs manually is totally the way to go.

FUCK FFTs!

I also happen to think it's a great exploratory tool, greater than any random inputs:

You get moments where you can create patterns manually via multiple controls that you'd never set up intentionally in a time line or via algorithms. And that's also valid for traditional demo making.

excellent stuff :)

seriously (all trolling and counter-trolling apart) it would be really cool to have more vj stuff like this on pouet : maybe new categories, new compos, new news, new threads, dunno... don't you agree ?

aftu: no. i like the side-effect niche cliche thingy. let's keep it.

cool stuff nevertheless :)

Quartz composer on mac also rules for this kind of stuff. What rules even more: wii controllers! You have buttons, motion control, and you can use it to draw on the screen and stuff :D

That second video reminds me of one particular prod: http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=53915 ;)

hm, only music synch i could see was a flashing background in the last video..

quartz composer/max/msp/vsxu/vvvv etc are all programs built for this kind of thing..

Also: http://www.3dconnexion.com/

3d mice, I know a few people who use these and are very happy with them. Not tried it myself. ipod/iphone too - accelerometer + multi-touch screen, wireless too. There's an app that does OSC output for it if I remember right.

We did an installation for Altparty 2009 that used Pure Data (vvvv & max/msp clone) for the webcam input and video effects:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoM1zcZcQV8

In my experience, these types of setups tends to be more about what the creators wanted to put into it with regards to technology, rather than making sure it produces a nice / interesting output.

I'd say the best people decide what they want on screen, then build the technology to do it. But yeah, I've seen a lot of "buy new toy, play with it, what appears on the screen is it".. it can be cool, but it's never quite on the well-thought-out/designed stuff. Guess it's like comparing an ASD demo and a party hack, it's a foregone conclusion unless you happen to be mfx :)

Yeah, it's hard to see all the different synch from a couple minutes' worth of a 3 hour gig. I wish I had full video sets of the stuff from the show after this, in seattle. I'll probably make a wankery video where I do the stuff at home on my projector and record it.
One limit of live performance is that it's tough to keep the beat of more than 2 or 3 things at once. So if I'm doing camera cuts and flashes it's tough to modulate color palette. It's all about what's most compelling at that moment.

I think stuff like this belongs in 'wild'... or perhaps on vimeo : p and the nice thing about using Processing is that it's basically a generic demo engine (albeit with no timeline) that's REALLY easy to code for.

In any case, loads of fun for 3 week's worth of goofing around. Gimme another year and I'll have Gantz Graf implemented!