The Last Analog Motion Graphics Machine [video]
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There are also quite a few software packages that implement analog synthesis techniques, like https://lumen-app.com/ and http://v002.info/about/
The eurorack modular synth boom is certainly introducing a lot of new people to analogue video synthesis. Exciting times!
Video? Eurorack and modular synthesizers of other format and kinds are about audio, right?
It’s all just voltage, but obviously with video oscillating at much higher rates.
You use most ‘audio’ modules with video modules and vice versa. All the typical logic works like divide, mult, add, etc.
It’s a really fascinating format!
The cost of entry is a ton of time learning from archaic resources, more time finding the devices and the money to accrue them.
Here's Scanimate + Moog; https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=184&v=1Cywgoftv4...
This kind of statements bother me because they are simply not true. You can have "tangible" controls (physical knobs and sliders) with digital signal processing back-end and I bet you that you can't tell the difference in a double blind test. This is the same bullshit that is thrown around by designers, artists and any kind of 'aficionados'- cliches of romanticization of the analog.
Oscilloscopes went full digital in 90's not because they were worse than analog counterparts. These are precision instruments that benefit from digital processing. Don't get me wrong - I own an analog oscilloscope for different reasons, i.e. I was fascinated by how things were done back in the day which I believe is the central theme of this thread. These analog motion graphics machines are amazing - NOT because of 'infinite resolution' but the process of creating art: Oscillators, scan rates, amplification, etc.
Kinda curious example to bring up; I was under the impression that early (ie 90s) digital oscilloscopes were quite seriously compromised, especially in the UX department.
It's not even that it is, or was, impossible to make digital equipment with responsive interfaces. It's rather that the easiest way to do it often involves a delay.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/the-possibilia...
In high school physics we were doing some experiments around pendulums and used metronomes to measure the period; I remember the teacher telling us about a former student of hers, a concert level musician, who could keep a beat in perfect timing without using a metronome at all.
And yes, digital audio typically inherently has some latency due processing typically being based on some buffers. Sure, you can try to make those buffers smaller but that is not always so easy to do.
On a full duplex phone call, you can tolerate quite a bit of latency, upwards of 600ms, provided there is no echo, as soon as echo is present, we notice the latency - but even on echo free calls, the longer the latency, the more likely both parties will end up speaking at the same time.
I do agree about how annoying it is to see people misled about the quality of digital products, though, particularly for consumer goods where people aren't interested in the implementation details anyway. I'm not about to splurge on an analog amplifier for my speakers, and I don't think most consumers should bother doing so either (again, unless they really appreciate the implementation details of an analog circuit).
Now I think some folks want particular analog sounds. There are digital replacements for most of them, and of course they are a lot more convenient, but they don't always sound _completely_ authentic. If you want the tuning instability, noise, distortion, etc., well, go ahead and maintain an antique synthesizer. It's kind of a pain, but if you really _must_ have the original sound, go for it.
What I miss is the quality of the actual keyboards. I had a chance to buy a vintage Yamaha KX-88 keyboard some years ago and I chickened out, and I regret it. If I had bought it, I'd probably be still enjoying it alongside my vintage DX-7.
The point, which you might have noticed when using digital and analogue oscilloscopes, is that delays come naturally in digital equipment. You _could_ probably get rid of it in all or most applications if you really made a point of doing so (and that would be very nice), but that is often not done.
There are good technical reasons to go digital, and in theory, no drawbacks. Yet, is pisses me off that I need to boot a motherf%*$cking oscilloscope and wait several seconds.
I have spent the first years of my career at an AR company whose constant worry was to lower latency and maximize increase rate. I know this stuff is hard and as an unrecognizable handicap I now have an eye for all the small glitches in video: occasional fps slip, brief shearing, dropped frame, etc... I have yet to find a giant advertisement screen that had none of these.
Most people think 60 ms latency and 30 fps is good enough but let me tell you, we had a very different kind of reactions when we had less than 16 ms of latency (i.e. "one frame") and 60 fps display (or rather that annoying 59.94 Hz that TV asked us and forced us to feed to the software through a specific clock plug).
When people talk about the "analog feel", that's what they mean: full fps (usually 50Hz in Europe, 59.94Hz in US an Japan) and <16 ms latency. No glitch, no shear (though analog system can shear) and no framedrops. Very few digital systems actually live up to that standard.
The notion that one could take a device that costs a few bucks and replicate a significant percentage of the capability (at least in terms of results, though not in terms of the creative process) that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and required a whole team to maintain and operate it effectively continues to be ridiculous to me.
As an old-timer who studied and worked in tape-based analog audio recording studios and at a pre-digital television station (barely, I was there when the digital machines moved in, just before I quit), this utter transformation of all of the audiovisual industries within my lifetime has been nothing short of incredible. I've watched it happen, and my mind still boggles at what can be done "in the box", even on modest hardware, today vs. 10, 20, or 30 years ago. Every decade sees an order of magnitude drop in price and order of magnitude increase in capability, at least for the non-physical aspects of the job (cameras, microphones, lenses, speakers, monitors, lights, instruments, room treatment for absorption/diffusion, etc. still cost a lot and probably always will, though even many those things have dropped in price precipitously due to the steadily improving quality of low-end products...once upon a time, a $50 microphone was a joke, today you can make a pretty decent recording with a $50 MXL or similar).
Props to the guy for maintaining the equipment, it is definitely cool thing even if I struggle to think what I'd do with it.
Given the ages involved, I'd expect those to be worn and faded to the point where they aren't visible.
I suspect he has done a while lot of maintanence and restoration on the devices. Even his jumpers appeared to be in new condition.
My first camera was digital and my first exposure to photo editing was with photoshop in high school. When I took a B&W photography class as a senior in college it was eye opening. We were in the darkroom dodging and burning photographs on the enlarger with our hands; it was exhilarating. I may not see eye to eye with Dave Sieg on digital, but I completely agree with him on physicality of creation. There is a qualitatively different feel when you are working with physical controls and within constraints of a non digital system.
> You plugin in things to make your animation. That is really where the term plugin came from.
Also this bit is also quite interesting. Is this etymology true?
Go back in time even to early 1990s and any video editor would tell you they'd kill for what we have now with modern digital video including effects.
I recall editing on u-matic tape in the 90s, man that was painful. You couldn't quite grab a frame, it was hit or miss if you wanted frame accuracy. I did enjoy the ergonomics of big control panels, switches, dials, but not the leads and plugs, and not rewinding tapes or losing quality when copying; 4:3 ratio everywhere and the list goes on.
5:21 "The true skill of the flying asshole wipe is in the timing."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stX3zM2oL8g
"Strict rules of conduct" -- pff! How retro!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4Kn3djJMCE
"Self-Organization and Pattern Formation in an Image Processing System"
"A video camera views its monitor: information flows in a closed optical-electronic loop"
Here is his paper about it that he published in Physica (1984):
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.
http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~chaos/
A great youtube comment on the video:
Ross Oldenburg
Crutchfield's paper is massively influential for video artists. I've done very similar things to this. The key is to have an image processing system in the feedback loop. In this case, he's using a Sandin IP (you can see it at 1:05), which is an early video synthesizer (that you had to build yourself. there weren't even kits. Just a manual). That's where the colors are coming from, and I would guess the black and white fields that are obscuring parts of the image at points. I would bet he's using a black and white camera, too. To pull of video feedback like this successfully, you need to have control over all aspects of the video signal and you need a camera that allows you to manually control the iris and focus. That said, it's amazing and a lot of fun. And LZX industries makes something similar to the Sandin IP today.
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Part of me thinks this should be in the Computer History Museum and not in this guy's garage - simply from a preservation standpoint.
At the same time, I'm not sure if this could be considered "computer history" or not - though it certainly has elements of analog computing.
The Scanimate was one of those iconic machines that ultimately helped to lead us to where we are today with computer graphics - if this is really the only operating one in existence (I don't necessarily doubt it, from the history I have read about it and early graphics), then proper preservation should be paramount.
But I can understand if the guy didn't want to give it up.
On a side note - how many here have seen this?:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj9pbs-jjis
Basically - computation of fractals using analog video feedback...kinda amazing that (in theory) something like could have been done in the 1950-60s using Eidophor projectors of the era (amazing analog tech in its own right)...
It is similar to the CGI industry's hard work being overlooked over the years, but maybe that is changing retrospectively as more people come to realize the feats they accomplished on antique hardware.
But, they also had a working PDP-1 with Space War that you could play, demonstrated and described by some of the people who'd built some of the original software and the game itself.
Admittedly, most of the equipment was display-only, but I think that's reasonabe...given the cost and effort to restore even one such device of that complexity, in an era when parts have to be scavenged from NOS or from donor machines or built from scratch using spotty design docs, it's entirely reasonable to focus on the devices that are either of notable significance (the first of a thing, or whatever), or things that the most expertise is readily available for (a lot of the docents and people who work/volunteer at CHM are computing pioneers, usually with a history of working with specific devices).
I love CHM, and think they do a great job, and have always really enjoyed my visits. I used to drag every visitor I had out to the CHM even if they had no interest in computers. Most people still enjoyed it. There's something wonderful about seeing the scale and intricacy of early computers.
Check the section labeled "Demonstrations": http://www.computerhistory.org/hours/
There's a PDP-1 lab, an IBM 1401 lab (that's new to me), and a RAMAC demonstration.