The History of Video Synthesizers

https://wearethemutants.com/2018/01/09/a-sloppy-machine-like-me-the-history-of-video-synthesizers/

by rcarmo • 8 years ago

85 16 8 years ago

Scanimation has always had a huge fascination for me. Not least because Scanimated stuff was in vogue when I was a kid, but their analogue and arguably intentionally imprecise means of production means you never got the same effect twice and every scene was unique. I purchased Scanimate DVD-1 way back when and it not only has a great selection of ads and some other feature productions, but some tidbits on production methods and what actually went into the technology. You can get it here (not involved, just a satisfied customer): http://www.scanimate.com/DVD1.html

I think some of the same applies to modern CGI compared to the old blood-sweat-film-and-tears visual effects methods, which doesn't always yield a better result, and sometimes comes off as soulless.

jhallenworld• 8 years ago

One scanimate machine is still running, see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wxc3mKqKTk

smogcutter• 8 years ago

My favorite is Dan Sandin's analogue video synth, from U of I Chicago circa 1971: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qh6jRzjmcY

He distributed the schematics free under a "copy it right" philosophy: you had his blessing as long as you didn't mess around with the schematics. All you had to do was send him a video tape asking for a copy, and he'd put them in the mail. If you had questions? Send another tape.

Ten or so years ago I emailed him and got a copy when I couldn't find them on google. They're fantastic, all hand drawn circuit diagrams and pcb layouts. Unfortunately some of the more important ICs are long out of production, and finding suitable replacements is beyond my skill. Not only that, the board he used to generate NTSC color was actually pulled from a specific model of video camera. To reproduce it today you'd have to either design a replacement from scratch or find a different approach.

robotdad• 8 years ago

I went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 90s, they had a Sandain image processor in the video lab then. I spent many all nighters patching that thing. It was actually part of why I wanted to go there. Someday I’ll have to get the VHS of that stuff into a digital format.

AHTERIX5000• 8 years ago

Very fascinating machines indeed and of course there are software available to mimic video synth stacks like Lumen and Cathodemer (http://lumen-app.com, http://store.steampowered.com/app/697860/Cathodemer)

anigbrowl• 8 years ago

No mention of Jeff Minter? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelia_(light_synthesizer...

rch• 8 years ago

LZX Industries is making some nice video synth modules for eurorack:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKWq8sLfRFc

https://youtu.be/MwrwJXuWI20?t=1m6s

pasta• 8 years ago

If you like this and you like programming you might want to take a look at Pure Data (or Max/MSP).

It's math to sound/video output by dragging inputs to outputs.

A lot of great stuff it made by such software.

DonHopkins2• 8 years ago

Nato.0+55+3d (released in 1999) was an amazing but notorious extension for Max that enabled live programming of real time video manipulation, networking and display.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nato.0%2B55%2B3d

"At the time of its release (the summer of 1999), NATO.0+55+3d was in demand as it appeared several years before other similar infrastructures such as GEM and Jitter (released by the makers of Max/MSP in October 2002). Earlier software such as Image/ine developed in 1997 at STEIM was drawing in a similar direction, but the fact that NATO.0+55+3d was operating inside the Max/MSP framework, using its "visual programming" protocol, provided at the same time greater ease of use and more flexibility, allowing the user to create his own applications and tools. It gained popularity among video artists and performers, who were using it for a large variety of purposes, prominently for live performance and interactive installation."

"The last version of NATO.0+55+3d modular was released in November 2000, while additional NATO objects were developed until June 2001."

I say it was notorious, due to the "art persona" who developed it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_(author)

"Netochka Nezvanova is the pseudonym used by the author(s) of nato.0+55+3d, a real-time, modular, video and multi-media processing environment. Alternate aliases include "=cw4t7abs", "punktprotokol", "0f0003", "maschinenkunst" (preferably spelled "m2zk!n3nkunzt"), "integer", and "antiorp". The name itself is adopted from the main character of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's first novel Netochka Nezvanova (1849) and translates as "nameless nobody."

Salon wrote an interesting article about her and her antics (including her lawsuit against Cycling '74, developer of Max): "The most feared woman on the Internet: Netochka Nezvanova is a software programmer, radical artist and online troublemaker. But is she for real?"

https://www.salon.com/2002/03/01/netochka/

"NN's reputation is based on mouth 2 mouth adverti.cement. When something is very well konstruckted and designed with a degree of integrity it stands on its own ... All the cool girls wear NN."

"As a community destroyer, she's fantastic," says Bernstein, the Brooklyn artist. "She's perhaps one of the Internet's first professional demolition experts. She's a real talent."

"The legend is entirely negative, in a sense. But it turns out that people are really attracted to that," says David Zicarelli, the founder of Cycling '74, a small software company in San Francisco,

"Her contribution as a Net artist is in some ways more culturally significant than her work as a programmer," says Beatrice Beaubien.

NN's response to that article:

http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-bold-020...

    10.  When thrown off a mailing list, 

     I have not been thrown off a mailing list.
     I have been illegally transformed into a yellow flower.

     A young girl one day found me, and with half closed eyes whispered:

     Perfection,
     Today you've peered in my direction.

mattkevan• 8 years ago

I understood very little of that, but if someone named Case or Casey was tasked to discover NN’s true identity by a shadowy billionaire or rogue AI I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the plot summary from an upcoming William Gibson novel.

With in-depth descriptions of Japanese reproductions of American workwear.

toothbrush• 8 years ago

Wow, what an interesting internet-rabbithole. Thank you. The archivist slash computer nerd in me finds this a very interesting crossover between forgotten internet lore and a charismatic personality.

jarmitage• 8 years ago

Browser-based live coding environment inspired by analog video synths: https://github.com/ojack/hydra

extralego• 8 years ago

It’s great to see Big Pauper mentioned toward the end. I visited his workshop about 4 years ago in Portland and purchased a modded device from him. It’s a wonderful piece. It’s nothing like a real video synth, of course, but I have used it for numerous performances. I use it in a light footed manner. It’s too easy to use these modded things without care to achieve sloppy results but Big Pauper aims to isolate the effects in a useful way.

DonHopkins2• 8 years ago

I've always had a love and fascination for the distortion effects of old video camera tubes, as well as video feedback, and also how the tubes themselves look: like George Jetson's apartment building.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube

"Image Orthicon Camera Tubes": http://www.r-type.org/articles/art-141.htm

"The 5655 three inch Image Orthicon television pick-up tube is an example of top quality television camera electronics from the late 1940s. These tubes were found in professional studio cameras in the 1950s and they replaced the Iconoscope tube cameras.": http://www.r-type.org/exhib/aaj0100.htm

They have a beautiful "blooming" effect when you overdrive them:

"Target overdrive visual effects from Concord NEI-17 vidicon camera: This some cool target overdrive effects made from my late 60s Concord NEI-17 B&W vidicon tube TV camera. I had the camera pointed to some items in the kitchen and to my computer and I adjust the external target control knob on the back of my camera up and down to which when the target level is adjusted high you get a bloom/glow effect and when adjusted to extreme excess the picture is solarized, very neat simple way to make instant cool effects! :D": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRQmAHpTnEQ

I wonder if anyone has written a shader that is a physical simulation of a vidicon tube, that can reproduce these effects. Here's an article by somebody who set out to mimic the effect, but I don't think he did a full physical simulation, he just tried to approxomate the effect:

http://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=35148

Here's the resulting video he made:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq7y4gsW3Yc

The Donnie and Marie show's Disco Finale has some awesome vidicon tube blooming effects with all the disco balls and sequins under spotlights:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-99Ux4_vnU

Portishead's "All Mine" video shows a somewhat subtler and beautiful vidicon tube effect, along with some simple video feedback:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsPTbRGu9Yk

The chaos researcher James Crutchfield did his PhD thesis at Santa Cruz about the space time dynamics video feedback, using an analog video processing computer. His video explains the theory and mathematics behind effective video feedback, which inspires me:

Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback. Citation: J. P. Crutchfield, "Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback". Physica 10D (1984) 229-245.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4Kn3djJMCE

Here's a paper he wrote that describes the effects in that video:

http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/Crutchfield.PhysicaD1984....

"Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback. James P. Crutchfield. Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratories, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA."

"Video feedback provides a readily available experimental system to study complex spatial and temporal dynamics. This article outlines the use and modeling of video feedback systems. It includes a discussion of video physics and proposes two models for video feedback dynamics based on a discrete-time iterated functional equation and on a reaction-diffusion partial differential equation. Color photographs illustrate results from actual video experiments. Digital computer simulations of the models reproduce the basic spatio-temporal dynamics found in the experiments."

Some interesting excerpts:

"In the beginning, I argued that a video feedback system is a space-time simulator. But a simulator of what exactly? This section attempts to answer this question as concretely as possible at this time. A very useful tool in this is the mathematical theory of dynamical systems. It provides a consistent language for describing complex temporal behavior. Video feedback dynamics, though, is interesting not only for the time-dependent behavior but also for its complex spatial patterns. In the following section I will come back to the question of whether current dynamical systems theory is adequate for the rich spatio-temporal behavior found in video feedback. This section introduces the qualitative language of dynamical systems [5], and then develops a set of discrete-time models for video feedback based on the physics of video systems. At the section's end I propose a continuum model akin to the reaction-diffusion equations used to model chemical dynamics and biological morphogenesis."

He also talks about "dislocations", which is similar to the effect of the error diffusion dithering that I love:

"A good example of quasi-attractors is the class of images displaying dislocations. This terminology is borrowed from fluid dynamics, where dislocations refer to the broken structure of convective rolls in an otherwise simple array. Dislocations are regions of broken symmetry where the flow field has a singularity. The formation of this singularity typically requires a small, but significant, energy expenditure*. In video feedback, dislocations appear as inter-digitated light and dark stripes. The overall pattern can be composed of regular parallel arrays of alternating light and dark stripes with no dislocations, and convoluted, maze-like regions where stripes break up into shorter segments with many dislocations. The boundaries between segment ends form the dislocations. They can move regularly or wander erratically. Dislocations form in pairs when a stripe breaks in two. They also annihilate by coalescing two stripes. Dislocations make for very complex, detailed patterns whose temporal evolution is difficult to describe in terms of dynamical systems because of their irregular creation and annihilation. Nonetheless, when perturbed very similar images reappear. A quasi-attractor would be associated with global features, such as the relative areas of regular stripe arrays and dislocation regions, the time-averaged number of dislocations, or the pattern's gross symmetry."

0xbadf00d• 8 years ago

On the subject of Video Synths - Teenage Engineering have a preview of their OP-Z:

https://www.teenageengineering.com/products/op-z

Based on their previous offerings I am very excited to see how this turns out (and a little worried for my bank balance)

romwell• 8 years ago

I fell like Winamp AVS and other visualization plug-ins deserve a mention here as well.

The History of Video Synthesizers

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