drawing in MMV

[Wouter]

Hi Folks,
I'm completely new to VJ'ing and MMV. I've been digging around for a bit, looking for a solution to my idea. I'll learn all about MMV, but before I dig any deeper, I need to know if my idea can be done! Here it goes:
I'm an illustrator and I would love to create sets of images (maybe a bit of movie too) that can react to music. I'm sure i'll figure out how that can be done.
Here comes the tricky part: in addition I would love to draw and paint directly in the projection, in MMV. I use Photoshop and a Wacom tablet.
Is there a way to integrate photoshop or read and use somehow the signal of the Wacom?
I'm not talking of creating a controller out of my Wacom: In short, I need to be able to paint 'live' on music...
Any ideas? Can this be done?

[Sadler]

Try this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=886&p=3876

[Magic]

If you want to transmit the live drawing directly from Photoshop to Magic, my general recommendation is to use something like ManyCam, which can capture an area of the desktop and then present it as an option in Magic's VideoCapture module: https://manycam.com/help/desktop/

[Wouter]

O that sounds great! And looks like a handy app I can use for a couple of other ideas, not too expensive...Thanks a lot!

[Sadler]

Free on giveawayoftheday today is PhotoDonut. Never used it myself but I mention it because it has a node based editor for creating effects (sound familiar?) and it looks like it has an interesting freehand painting mode which will clone from a photo in the chosen brush style.

[Wouter]

I've managed to record some drawings made in photoshop and these are now short video's! It's great.
Now these are just static, not interacting with music in any way. I've managed to play those video's in MMV, but here is a noob question
How do I get these to interact with the sound on stage? What gear do I need and how do I tap the sound coming from the stage into my laptop?

[Magic]

Assuming that there are microphones or instruments or speakers on stage, the best thing would be to get the audio from the main sound mixing board. You could probably talk to the sound engineer, and he could give you a cable. Then, if you have a laptop with an audio input, it's a simple matter of plugging in the cable. It would probably look like this:

cable.jpg (3.45 KiB) Viewed 6242 times

You would plug it into the input on your laptop which has the microphone icon:

laptop.jpg (9.41 KiB) Viewed 6242 times

It would end up looking like this:

images.jpg (6.83 KiB) Viewed 6242 times

Then, in Magic, all you have to do is make sure that input is selected.

If there isn't a sound mixing board for your stage, or there are no microphones or instruments, you could try using the microphone on your laptop, but the quality wouldn't be as good. A better solution would be to buy an external microphone, put it on stage, and run a long cable to your laptop.

Does that help?

[Wouter]

For those interested. After fiddling around with some software i created this workflow:
- Draw by hand
- Digitalize in Illustrator
- Animate in Animate (Flash and export as loops
- create playlist in MMV, assign audio input and use MMV for the live presentation

It was pretty awesome but I missed a bit the option in this flow to draw in realtime, as all loops were created in advance.
Still it's something different.

Here is a Making-of + some footage of the 'live' performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ld5rEKtETUk
And a trailer of the visuals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bIGt5u4BF0&t=1s

Some pictures: http://hetgraafschap.be/werk/musicvisual

Let me know what you think! Cheers