Hippotizer

Green Hippo

2011-07-26T11:09:00.001+02:00

This Blog was started in 2006 and was maintained until 2009 by Josh, but it is now no longer continued.

For latest Hippotizer news, please go to www.green-hippo.com.

curveLED and Hippotizer at Microsoft

2009-08-31T08:51:00.003+02:00

Date Announced: 24 Jul 2009

The newly constructed Microsoft campus at Redmond, WA includes a unique interactive experience: Each major building lobby features a 12 ft. wide x 27 ft. high curveLED transparent video display, driven by custom Mode Studios interactive software, with Hippotizer media servers as an integral part of the control system. The installation was designed and specified by Callison Architects of Seattle, in conjunction with Mode Studios’ Bob Bonniol. Scott Bokowski, the Project Producer, headed up installation and system integration along with Larry Darling of Epic Production Technologies. Show Control systems, control racks and audio systems were designed and provided by Electrosonic, Inc. and include four Hippotizer Stage media servers. Custom media content and live, real-time interactive control was provided by Mode Studios. “This project presented a number of challenges,” says Bob Bonniol. “The goal was to create interactive installations representing the energy and activity of the buildings. To remain compelling, the interactive experience had to be constantly evolving. The curveLED is perfectly suited to the concept of subtly blending display and atrium architecture. Among many other benefits, adding the Hippotizers to our own bespoke interactive programming allowed ease of content management, and access to the numerous effects that otherwise could never have been coded on time.” One of the advantages of the curveLED display system is its true 75% transparency. A person standing on a balcony located behind the system has a virtually unobstructed view of the main lobby areas, with no visible frames, wires, or connections. The curveLED system also offers unprecedented flexibility for creating three-dimensional video displays. It can be configured to conform to any shape, such as waves or curves, and can be installed suspended or free-standing. The system’s super bright SMD pixels provide high-quality 40 mm video resolution. At Microsoft, curveLED’s intensity control feature allows for daylight and nighttime viewing at a constant level via light sensors located throughout the lobbies. It is truly great to see a project like this come to fruition” says TMB’s Architectural Director Chris Curran. “All the work and effort was definitely worth it: The end result, giving the ability to interact with this breathtaking visual work of art, is truly memorable, befitting a company of Microsoft’s stature. This is an impressive, exciting landmark that combines the best of 21st Century art and technology.” Hippotizer media servers are recognized as the leading solution for real-time video effects, manipulation and playback. Prominent productions and installations worldwide are now specifying the Hippotizer, making it “the industry’s favorite media server.” Find out more about Callison Architects at www.callison.com. Epic Production Technologies can be accessed at www.epicpt.com. Mode Studios can be found at www.modestudios.com. Electrosonic Solutions web address is www.electrosonic.com/solutions. Hippotizer and curveLED are distributed by TMB. For more information about Hippotizer by Green Hippo, visit the TMB Hippotizer web page at www.tmb.com/products/hippotizer. Learn more about curveLED at www.tmb.com/products/curveLED. For immediate information in the Seattle area, please contact the local representative Lighting Group NW at www.lightinggroupnw.com

Contact TMB marketing@tmb.com 10643 Glenoaks Blvd. Pacoima, CA 91331 818.899.8818

E-mail: tmb-info@tmb.com

Web Site: www.tmb.com

Convergence of Video and Light

2008-06-10T14:29:00.003+02:00

Green Hippo - manufacturer of the Hippotizer media servers? Not only! During the recent years, Green Hippo also started a development together with Barco. The goal was to combine Light and Video in an innovative way - the result is the Barco DML-1200:

It is a (mechanically movable) Light AND Video-projector AND MediaServer (special Hippotizer version) all in one! There is no comparable thing on the planet yet.

Some more info can be found here.

Eurovision Song Contest 2008

2008-05-27T07:33:00.013+02:00

Eurovision 2008 in Belgrade was again driven by Hippotizers, supplied by procon.

The whole rig was run on only 2 V3 Hippotizers HD (1 x single output HD for the floor and 1 x dual output for the LC and S-lite wall) with another 2 as tracking backups, and one used for content recoding and distribution (= 5 V3 Hippotizers HD in total).

With about 500m² of LEDs the physical setup seemed somewhat bigger than the one last year. The Hippotizers were run from a Grand MA by Timo Kauristo from Sweden - no surprise the visual show for Sweden was probably the most fine tuned this year:

Visually, my personal favorite was Armenia:

However, congratulations to Russia, who won the contest with a rather simplistic visual concept:

Hannah Montana

2007-12-21T09:48:00.000+01:00

Ever heard of Hannah Montana? No? She is the new Britney Spears! When she enters the stage, deafening screeching starts, and it doesn't stop for the next two hours.

Disney's 54-date Hannah Montana tour of North America, the 'Best of Both Worlds' Tour, started in October in St. Louis, Missouri and ends January 9, 2008 in Albany, New York. Featuring 15-year old actress Miley Cyrus it is based around the character of Miley Stewart who lives a double life as an normal teenage schoolgirl during the day, transforming into famous pop singer, Hannah Montana, at night.
Four Hippotizers are used to run media through a proprietary Nocturne LED wall system as well as some Barco LED products and a Vista Systems Spider. All are running off of the Timeline and synchronized with Midi Time Code.
It's hard to become famous these days without a Hippotizer.

Nobel Prize for the Hippotizer? Nearly!

2007-12-21T09:19:00.000+01:00

Did you know that Hippotizers were used for the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm, 2008? Me neither! Only now I just received the information:

Johan of West Lighting (the very same who ran Hippotizers at the Thessalonika Song Contest in Greece in last months HippoWire) augmented the team at Stadshuset in Stockholm where he used several Hippotizers to display Peppe's content for the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony:
Two Hippotizer V3 HD networked servers were used to run media on two Barco FLM 18 projectors and some Barco OLite 510 modules. These were used to project clouds and ambient mood effects up in the roof.
The projection up in the roof was heavily keystoned and a bit warped which the Hippotizers handled brilliantly. The projectors were shooting from opposite sides so the images formed a kind of vertical panorama.
Video content was created onsite by the mightily talented Peppe assisted by Lennart Wåhlin and used along with some Beacon Digigobo content. Lighting was designed by Mr Per Sundin.

Johan West, YOU ARE A LEGEND!

Pufferfish partners with Green Hippo

2007-12-18T16:57:00.000+01:00

Pufferfish, an Einburgh-based developer of spherical inflatable display systems, announces a new partnership with Green Hippo to user-friendly AV solutions.

Until now, content for the PufferSphere, the company's main product, had to be pre-rendered in AfterFX in order to appear geometrically correct on the display. The Hippotizer essentially operates like a real-time version of AfterFX, with an intuitive GUI. By developing a free "Pufferizer" plug-in, Green Hippo has opened up a second route to spherical content production, allowing for real-time "spherizing" of any type of content, in addition to Green Hippo's existing pre-rendering option.

Read full story

Green Hippo @ Plasa 2007

2007-09-18T14:32:00.000+02:00

As every year, Green Hippo had its exhibition stand at Plasa in Earls Court, London. This year, Hippotizer V3 was officially released.

The Hippotizers got their own customized Hardware case, which makes their outside adequately professional as their internals. The whole case is lit from the inside with LEDs (of adjustable RGB Color) and an LCD front panel allows to access some functionality even without a GUI. Even more important is the back of the case, where you will now find all kind of video output format plugs you could expect from a professional Media Server.

New to the existing Product Range (Hippotizer Express, Hippotizer Stage, Hippotizer HD) is "Hippoportamus" (aka "Hippotizer Junior") - a Hippotizer V3 with 2-Layers, running in a Mac Mini!

ZooKeeper is the name for the standalone Software (+ Dongle) that allows you to run a remote GUI for one or multiple Hippotizer in a Network. It is now optionally sold together with the Hippotizers. It can e.g. be installed on a Laptop and allows to control all Hippotizers from there.

The Hippotizer V3 GUI (remote or local) allows to rearrange all Windows in a way that will fit your specific needs (especially in terms of resolution), as e.g. shown in the Screenshot below:

On the Software side, there were many changes since Plasa 2006, the most important ones are the following:
- Performance Improvements
- Automated Media Transcoding during Import
- Many GUI improvements, especially Timeline related functionality
- "Beat Bridge" - a Hipponet Component that allows to map animate any Hippotizer Parameter to an external Audio Source
- MIDI and DMX Hipponet Components

People often ask me what is the main difference between Hippotizer V3 and other Media Servers. Well, there are many differences, but I think the most important one is that a Hippotizer Setup is totally scalable without adding complexity in maintainance. That means, if you need more processing power, you just connect multiple Hippotizers in an ordinary LAN and remote control them all together the same way as you would do with a single Hippotizer. Distributed Realtime Rendering that really works flawlessly! This together with the superior Multilayer HD Media Playback Engine and the powerful Timeline make the Hippotizer absolutely outstanding compared to all other Media Servers.

In the new brochure, there is a sample list of diverse projects where Hippotizers were used in the past and up to date:

Theatre
Love - Cirque du Soleil Las Vegas
Wintuk - Cirque du Soleil New York
Disney's "The little Mermaid" on Broadway
Deuce - Broadway
Blue Man Group "How To Be A Megastar Tour"
Blue Man Group Lugano /Orlando /Berlin
Young Frankenstein - Broadway
Rembrandt The Musical
Sinatra - London Palladium
Daddy Cool - London West End
The History Boys Broadway
Bollywood The Show - Tour 2007
Frobisher 2007
Daddy's Girl The Opera
Avenue Q - London West End
We will Rock You - The Queen Musical
Mary Poppins
Starlight Express
Lennon The Musical

Concert
Destiny's Child Destiny Fulfilled Tour
Bon Jovi - Have A Nice Day Tour
Lilly Allen - Tour 2007
Def Leppard - Tour 2006
Nickelback - Tour 2006, 2007
Lucie Silvas - 2007
Orchestral Maneuvres In the Dark (OMD) - Tour 2007
Journey - 2006
The Shapeshifters - 2007
Johnny Hallyday
Erasure - Light At The End Of The World Tour
AOL Winter Warmer / Summer Cooler
BLAST II - Tour Japan
T-Mobile "Street Gigs" - Tour
Golda's Balcony - Tour
Basement Jaxx - Tour 2005
Foo Fighters - Tour 2005
3 Doors Down - Tour 2005
Asia Tsunami Relief Concert
Eppu Normaali - Tour
Jari Sillanpää & Katri Helena
Hector

Club/Festivals
Industrial Resolution Manchester 2007
Glastonbury 2005, 2006
Glastonbury - 2007 - Jazz World and Glade stages
Montreux Jazz Festival
Cat Empire UK Tour
Global Gathering - 2005, 2006, 2007
Sanctuary Festival - 2007
Metro Weekender - 2006, 2007
FIRE Nightclub Vauxhall
Luminar Leisure Group
Electric Gardens - 2007
RNJ Festival 2005, 2006, 2007
Southport Weekender - 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007
Hardcore Weekender 2005, 2006, 2007
Tranzmission @ Alexandra Palace - 2007
Tidy Weekender - 2005, 2006, 2007
10th IAAF World Championships

Television
Eurovision Song Contest - Helsinki - 2007
X-Factor - 2006, 2007
Dancing On Ice - 2007
Britains Best Talent
Paul O'Grady Show
MTV3 50 Years Anniversary
BBC Children In Need
The World Music Awards - 2007
'Davina' - BBC Television
The Oprah Winfrey Show
MTV TRL Studios New York
Y3 Fashion Show New York
Telvis Gaala
NRJ Radio Awards - 2006, 2007
T4 On The Beach - 2005, 2006, 2007
Logies Awards Australia
Jussi Gaala and Emma Gaala

Other Customers
BMW Formula 1 Team - Kuala Lumpur
Bristol Town Square Project
SKY Christmas Party
Mercedes Benz Detroit Motor Show
Nokia Worldwide Conference - 2005
Eragon World Premier
The Americas Cup
Paul Weller "Under The Floorboards Video"
Baby Phat Fashion event - Fall 2005
TPI Awards - 2006, 2007
Party For Wonder - Boston - May 2006
The Robin Hood Foundation
Seattle Opera House
Studio 1 Helsinki
GTV 9 Australia
Peacock Theatre - Helsinki
Raumanhovi Club/Rauma
Onnela Club/Tampere
Raumanlinna Club/Rauma
Oulu City Theatre

Dreams in Realtime: LifeForce by ASD

2007-08-10T10:54:00.000+02:00

The Demo Competition at Assembly was mainly a fight between the traditional C++ PC demos and the XNA Demos (Windows/XBOX 360). At least those people who always say that C# performs bad should have shut up by now - there were plenty of nice and well performing XNA demos!

Nonetheless, the trophy of the winner belongs to ASD (Andreomeda Software Development), for their C++/OpenGL demo called LifeForce!

The 8 months of hard work for that demo were well worth it. It is hard to describe the content of the demo in words. Once more, ASD combines millions of effects flawlessly and uses spectacular transitions in between the scenes. The music varies wonderfully and underlies the poetic and surreal content of life and death perfectly. The stunning mixes of 2D and 3D give the demo a never-seen-before artistic touch. This is the true Art of the Demoscene, a Dream in Realtime!

In a sense this artistic masterpiece must be like a slap in the face for Intel: ASD has recently participated with Beyond the walls of Eryx at the Intel Demo Competition. The chip manufacturer had explicitly praised to combine the most creative demos from the demoscene with the impressive power of its new Quad-Core-Processors. But funnily, what ASD made for Intel looks rather simple compared to LifeForce!

Lots of respect from Green Hippo to all team members of ASD (especially to the coder Kostas, aka Navis)! It was great to be there at Assembly and to make friends! You are inspiring us, we love you!

As mentioned above, there were many great releases at Assembly. You should e.g. also check out the following short movie called 'Realtime Demo Wannabe':

If you are interested in Photos of Assembly, search for "asmsummer07" at Flickr!

Back to the roots: Green Hippo @ Assembly!

2007-07-27T15:29:00.000+02:00

It all started with the fact that Green Hippo is hiring! We are looking for one to three new programmers (yes, you have read that right! If you are skilled (in C++, MFC, C#, DirectX, DirectShow), interested, and willing to work in London, your chances for a superb job have never been higher!).

Green Hippos requirements for programmers are certainly over average - where to find the right people? After some discussions, we decided to get back to our roots: the demoscene. The biggest annual gathering of the demoscene is the Assembly demoparty in Helsinki, held next week:

We thought that at Assembly, we have best chances to find the highly skilled and motivated people for our team. In order to demonstrate the Hippotizers and the related work to the interested geeks, we asked the Assembly Organizers if we can boost their AV setup with one or two Hippotizers. ;-) And now it's official: 1 or 2 Hippotizers will be used at Assembly, provided by West Lighting (what would we do without Johan West?).

No matter how good or bad the intros and demos of the competitions will be, with the Hippotizers, this Assembly will feature the best eyecandy ever!

Hippotizer drives Video for Nickelback Tour

2007-07-24T08:40:00.000+02:00

The Nickelback North American summer tour began in June at the Bay Roberts Festival in St. John's, Newfoundland and runs through September, with a final date in Kansas City. The tour is a mix of stadiums and festivals, most of which are already sold out.

Mode Studios and the tour's lighting designer, Chris Maeder, combine video and lighting for scenic displays and effects. Two Hippotizer Stage media servers feed video content (synchronized with audio) to a Barco SLite 26 x 22' video display housed in a 60 x 65' structure and two outboard projection screens. Four Hippotizer Express machines drive video to a combination of Barco MiPIX and Element Labs VERSA Tubes.

"Hippotizer is our friend," says Bob Bonniol, Mode Studios' creative director. "It is user-friendly and has a well-developed 'personality' for use with all the major lighting consoles. Hippotizer is flexible and handles any media file. For Nickelback, multiple live cameras are routed to the Hippotizers in real time for IMAG purposes. Hippotizer really is a great performer."

Click here to read full Article

Manchester International Festival

2007-07-16T08:33:00.000+02:00

According to this Blog you might got the impression that nothing happened on the Hippotizer sales front since Eurovison - but in fact exactly the contrary has happened: Green Hippo got flooded with so many projects that we simply lacked time to blog about anything!

With the network ability of Hippotizer V3, it is now possible to drive uberdimensional resolutions very easily, and the recently hottest project related to that was "Industrial Resolution" at "Manchester International Festival":

Technical Setup:

Screen - 48 metres in width
10 beamers - 35HD
10 Hippotizers - V3 HD
1 Spyder
All content created at 5760 x 2160 - I-REZ
Total clips encoded for various synced outputs/backups/controllers etc - 12000 HD mpeg2

Clever Desktop Splitting

2007-06-06T14:33:00.001+02:00

So you got this wonderful HD monitor or Laptop with amazingly high display resolutions, congratulations! With all that great desktop space, sooner or later you will also want to have a tool that allows you to position the Windows in a clever way at the touch of some shortcuts. At least, that's what happened to me. After a short search on the web, I found 'SplitView' - nice but not for free. But one of the great things being a coder is helping yourself: I coded a little tool called SplitDesk.

SplitDesk runs in System Tray and allows to quickly position windows on useful positions (even in a multi-monitor environment) at the touch of shortcuts (described in the readme.txt)

Requirements:

Microsoft Windows XP or Vista
.NET Framework 2.0

License:

SplitDesk is FREEWARE - enjoy! - and send me a postcard if you like it. ;-)

Download:

Click this Link to download the zip file containing the readme.txt and SplitDesk.exe.

If you are interested in the source code contact me at: h i p p o t i z e r @ g m x . n e t

UPDATE (27. April 2010): You'll also like the tool AquaSnap (which wasnt available at the time when I developed SplitDesk) http://www.nurgo-software.com/products/aquasnap

Microsoft Surface Computing

2007-05-31T08:15:00.000+02:00

About 3 years ago, I was sitting on the balcony together with one of my friends, and we were talking about an imaginary Restaurant where the eating tables were displays, allowing you to browse the menu card, preview the menus, play games etc...

Now Microsoft has taken this idea a whole step further and it is called Microsoft Surface.
What is it? Basically it is an extended multi-touch-screen device. On top of that (or physically more correct: underneath!), a built-in infrared camera recognizes objects on the surface, which leads to very interesting possibilities of interactions between this objects - especially if they support wireless networking. For example, you put a camera and a cell phone onto the surface, then drag n drop photos from the camera over to the cell phone.

Have a look at the video to get a better idea!

Sidenote: The table UI experience is built entirely using WPF and the .NET Framework - which is a great statement about its power.

And why do I write about that in the Hippotizer blog? Well, after all, it is about interactive visuals. In a future world full of surface computers, applications driven by Hippotizers will be endless!

Exactly 10 years ago

2007-05-26T17:16:00.000+02:00

Exactly 10 years ago - Pentecost 1997 - my friends Kay Huber and Stefan Niderhauser and me sqeezed ourselves and our computers into a small room and locked ourselves up for 3 days. The mission was to:

learn the programming language C
get used to the Watcom C++ development environment under DOS
port realtime graphic effects from pascal and real mode assembler (where you could only allocate 64k memory blocks as maximum) to C and protected mode assembler (mainly my task)
code new Effects (mainly Stefans task)
code Tools (mainly Kays task)

After the 3 days were over, some effects were successfully ported, some new effects (face morphing) were on the way, and a little toolkit made our life as easy as possible.

This was the start of an interesting story all about realtime visuals:

Later in 1997, Kay and me released the demo "Matura'97" at the final party of the gymnasium Langenthal. Because it is a DOS-demo, I only managed to put the soundtrack (which was ripped from other demo sceners) into an executable that runs on Windows.
In 1998, Kay and me released the (DOS) demo "Wild" at Buenzli 6 - THE annual demo party in Switzerland, where it ranked first!
In 1999, I decided to create a product that would allow you to "drag n drop" demos - the idea of visualJockey was born. Yannick Suter and Christop Polus embraced this idea with big enthusiasm - we founded the company Visualight AG (I have to add that other people were involved too, but due to several reasons they quit the company sooner or later). We also took Vadim Gorbatenko (living in Siberia, Russia - Dr. in Physics and a very experienced programmer) as a freelancer on board.
In summer 2000, we released the first version of vJo (visualJockey). Version 2 and 3 followed in 2001 and 2002.
In 2002 - Yannick and Chris meanwhile also got another job in order to live a financially normal life- Sean Westgate from Green Hippo approached me. That time, Green Hippo had a product called IGS3, which was basically a PC with some specific MPEG2 decoding PCI cards and a self made Software to control the playback of up to 4 simultaneous MPEG2 outputs. They wanted to make it more interactive and had stumbled across visualJockey. After our first meeting, the idea of Hippotizer Version 1 was born.
Plasa 2003: Release of Hippotizer V1
Plasa 2004: Release of Hippotizer V2
In 2005, many Hippotizer V2 projects were realized. The most prestigious is LOVE from Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas, using 20 V2 Hippotizer HDs - designed to run for at least the next 10 years. That year, Green Hippo also bought its own worldwide distributor 'Scene Change' and employed its key persons Nigel Sadler and Kitty Tang.
2006: Peter Kaufmann (from Switzerland) relocated to London. This lead to a real boost in software development and made the big jump from V2 to V3 possible.
Plasa 2006: Release of Hippotizer V3 beta
Eurovision 2007: Launch of Hippotizer V3 at the Eurovision Song Contest in Helsinki

And I bet all that is just the beginning of an even brighter future! But for today, my personal credits fully belong to Kay Huber for pointing me the right way exactly 10 years ago.

THANK YOU KAY! :-)

Eurovision 2007: Visual setup demystified

2007-05-23T15:59:00.000+02:00

You might get the impression that this blog is all about Eurovision only. Well, it isn't; there will be plenty of other Hippotizer projects soon, I promise!

But since Hippotizer V3 has definitely arrived at Eurovision 2007 and because everything went without the simplest glitch, Green Hippo gets flooded with positive feedback and Hippotizer V3 orders!

So I think the least thing I owe you now is a schematic overview over the setup. The following picture gives you a brief overview:

V3 Hippotizers used:

A (Pan Mode, Dual Output), Stage background left and right
B (Pan Mode, Dual Output), Stage Background middle
C (Single Mode), Stage Floor
D (Pan Mode, Dual Output), Catwalk
E (Single Mode), feeded to the Big Screens in the Stadium on the upper left and right of the hall
F: Remote V3 Hippotizers with GUIs

And here some more technical details:

2 Hippotizer V3 master units were used for timeline programming and running (1 of them as spare)
1 MOTU Timepiece that was receiving smpte and that driving the Hippotizer V3 Master over USB, one Motu spare unit was also there.
2 GrandMAs, plus an additional one as backup (thanks to Grand MA for that and especially Mr Marcus Krömer).
Hipponet FOH with cat 6 into a Zyxel GS2024 switch, same with Artnet, Cat5 to a Zyxel GS2024 switch.
The switches where supplied with miniGbic fiber transmitters and the signal was run from FOH to "serverland" over Draka tactical fibre to 2 Zyxel switches, one for HippoNet and one for artnet.
In serverland all V3 Hippotizers connected to HippoNet switch with cat6 cables and Artnet with Cat5e cables.
In Hippoland we also had a backup Hippotizer V3 following Artnet.
All servers had identical media that was encoded on one Hippotizer V3 and then the V3 Hippotizers media syncronization tool took care of distribution to all servers.
All custom media was made pixel to pixel so the pixel 1:1 function of the V3 Hippotizers played a major role.
Raw media size: 245 GB
Another thing that was very important is the fact that you could upload and distribute media *while* programming (new feature in V3!), very useful.
All master layers where rotated 270 degrees because the Barco processors could not take care of that.
We did then output dvi through Gefen DVI detectives to the Barco processors running the LED walls.
Barco in use was Barco OLite 510, Barco MiTrix and a Barco R12 projector.
There were 24 preview monitors in total: Samsung 22" with a resolution of 1650x1050 pixels.
The content on the FogScreen was fed by one of the Hippotizers too (Hippotizer C?).
Some Songs (e.g. Andorra) were using up to 6 HD Layers on each Hippotizer V3, and had 600 cues during only 3 minutes.

Brief summary:

5 HD units in use for show (A,B,C,D,E)
4 Backup units
4 Zyxel switches with Gbic + 2 spare
3 Control units (2 spares)
1 1000 feet tactical fiber
24 22" monitors

Hippotizer V3 timeline programmer was Mr Zok Sabijan and the MA was programmed by Mr Mikko Linnavuori. Lighting and Video was supervised by Mikki Kunttu.
Sean Westgate, Tom Etra, Nigel Sadler, James Ross Heron from Green Hippo helped a lot too (directly or through Skype!)

Special thanks for all that detailed info to Johan West from West Lighting, who took great care of this complex setup - and had another gig with multiple V3 Hippotizers the day after Eurovisions grand final. If you are keen on learning something from somebody in this industry, you definitely have to meet Johan!

ESCTV

2007-05-22T09:25:00.000+02:00

Not happy with the quirky quality of the Eurovision 2007 YouTube Videos? Then check out ESCTV - you can watch the grand final again in great quality online and for free!

1) Click the picture shown below

2) You will be promoted to download the OctoShape plugin:

3) Download the plugin and install it.

4) Now you are ready to jump into the stream (it continuously loops, so if you want to watch it right from start you will have to wait...)

Enjoy!

All Eurovision grand final videos

2007-05-14T10:15:00.000+02:00

Opening (Lordi)

Bosnia & Herzegovina

Spain

Belarus

Ireland

Finland

FYR Macedonia

Slovenia

Hungary

Lithuania

Greece

Georgia

Sweden

France

Latvia

Russia

Germany

Serbia

Ukraine

United Kingdom

Romania

Bulgaria

Turkey

Armenia

Moldova

Bonus: Apocalyptica

CONGRATULATIONS to Serbia
(notice the Green Hippo Logo at the End of the Credits! :-))

Btw: Terry Wogan (usually known for his sarcasm) from BBC was really impressed with the stage. He mentioned how wonderful it was on at least 3 separate occasions. e.g. 'the real star is the production' and 'best stage ever'. Thanks Terry!

All Eurovision 2007 semi final videos

2007-05-12T05:49:00.000+02:00

Bulgaria

Israel

Cyprus

Belarus

Iceland

Georgia

Montenegro

Switzerland

Moldova

The Netherlands

Albania

Denmark

Croatia

Poland

Serbia

Czech Republik

Portugal

FYR Macedonia

Norway

Malta

Andorra

Hungary

Estonia

Belgium

Slovenia

Turkey

Austria

Latvia

Hippotizer V3 is Launched

2007-05-12T04:54:00.000+02:00

The Hippotizer V3 media server started shipping May 9. The product launch follows on the heels of worldwide Beta testing on productions including London's Theatre de Complicité, the Broadway production of Deuce, and the TPI Awards in London, where a network of three V3 Hippotizers provided both video and audio to the entire award ceremony. V3 also featured in the World Premiere of Frobisher at the Calgary Opera and Hard Dance Awards 2007 in London. Upcoming productions to be served by Hippotizer V3 include Dancing With the Stars on NBC TV; five networked V3 Hippotizers are currently used in the 2007 EuroVision Song Contest in Helsinki.
[read more]

Eurovision 2007 Semi Final: Full Success!

2007-05-11T11:15:00.000+02:00

The EuroVision 2007 semi final in Helsinki is over. What a blast!

A brief description of the technical Setup:

5 Hippotizers (with 2 HD outputs each) were used in total: Nr#1 in PanMode for the LEDs on the left/right back the stage (this one also had SDI live inputs, but it was never visible in the broad casted TV signal). Nr#2 in PanMode for the 90° flipped LED at the center back the stage. Nr#3 in SingleMode for the circular floor of the stage. Nr#4 in PanMode for the long catwalk in front of the stage. Nr#5 in SingleMode for the screens on the left and right high above of the stadium (for the audience, not for broadcast TV).
FOH (front of house, 100 meters away) remote control of all V3 Hippotizers through just one GUI (Gigabit network fiber optics)
The synchronization followed external timecode (smpte) fed to the V3 Hippotizers through Motu timepiece MIDI signals to the V3 Hippotizers. External DMX and Hippotizer-internal timelines were used as well - complex but offers all the options you can dream of.

My overall impression of what was broad casted through TV was excellent. The footage was totally unique for most songs, featured extensive timeline programming with many live effects in up to 6 layers per hippo, different aspect ratios, dynamic in/out-points, masking, overlays etc! The full palette of the possibilities of Hippotizer V3 was used. It run all so smooth that it was just hard to recognize - it all just looked like being perfectly prerendered! The SDI Live Video inputs were used in one Hippotizer and displayed on the big LED wall behind the stage while interviewing the actors during the voting, but this was never broad casted in TV.

Because the displays are so incredibly BIG, things look very different if you stand in front (or above :)) of them or if you just look at a camera shot in TV. E.g. if the camera zooms on the head of an actor and you just see a very tiny bit of the LEDs in the background, it looks horrible if the visuals on the LEDs move too fast or if there are too many colors - but it looks great if the camera zooms away and you see the whole stage. So, in fact my overall impression is that the design team did a great job with very clever animations that looked good for all camera shots. Often it was the simple things that just looked great for both situations - sometimes even just static background! Big congrats and respect to Mikki Kunttu, Johan West, Sean Westgate, Peter Kaufmann, Nigel Sadler, Tom Etra, James Heron, Ola Melzig and all the others who worked so hard during the last weeks!

My personal favorites (both visually and sonic) were Moldova and Bulgaria - enjoy!

Moldova

Bulgaria

Oh, and not to forget, here is the list of the semi final winners (preceded by their start numbers in the final):

03. Belarus
06. FYR Macedonia
07. Slovenia
08. Hungary
11. Georgia
14. Latvia
17. Serbia
21. Bulgaria
22. Turkey
24. Moldova

Doing the best show ever is the only priority

2007-05-10T18:36:00.000+02:00

Today evening is EuroVision time, don't miss it! Here is a set of photo previews of some (but far not all) countries. All photos are copied from the EuroVisionDiary, special thanks once more to Ola Melzig:

Albania

Andorra

Austria

Belarus

Belgium

Bosnia & Herzegovina

Bulgaria

Cyprus

Denmark

Estonia

Finland

Georgia

Hungary

Iceland

Israel

Latvia

Lithuania

Malta

Moldova

Netherlands

NorwayPoland

Portugal

Sweden

Switzerland

TurkeyUkraine

Eurovision 2007 - beyond your Imagination

2007-04-30T09:06:00.000+02:00

Today I discovered the Eurovision Diary blog, with some really nice photos of the current preparations. Photos by Ola Melzig.

The heart of the Stage, bird perspective.

Different LED Stage Elements filled with some default Hippotizer footage and test patterns.

The LEDs embrace the back of the stage.

Walking on LEDs - the Catwalk! The glossy overlay plates add a nice blur.

Again the Catwalk with some "Lights On!" test going on in the background.

A distant view to the stage. The thing on the left might be an HD camera (just my guess).

Everything in action, with about 60 Control Monitors in the foreground!

This must be the Hippotizer control corner. Or at least on of them.
The HD monitor in the middle is a typical Hippotizer V3 GUI.

Did I mention that the location is BIG? (Ice Hockey stadium)

Hippotizer at the Brewery, London

2007-04-25T08:58:00.000+02:00

Met3 has supplied a complete new and largely bespoke LED interior architectural lighting scheme for the Brewery, one of the largest, most attractive and most popular corporate event venues in London.

The main new and special fixture designed for the project, is the 1 metre long Met3 Intellicove (i-Cove) fixture. It contains 24 RGB pixels (using very bright 1 Watt Luxeon emitters), and each second pixel is addressable, giving 12 RGB channels on each unit. This means a whole range of effects like ripples, waves and numerous others are possible.

The fixtures are all pixel mapped through a Hippotizer media server which offers 3 control options. The first is via Artistic License Light Switches with preset buttons for on/off color looks. The second is via a custom DMX panel designed by PSL and Met3 and put together by Montague and PSL, allowing a DMX line to be fed into the Hippotizer with the pixel map as another media layer. The entire pixel mapping was carried out by Montague and PSL in conjunction with Green Hippo.

Eurovision: LED Walls, Fog Screens and Hippotizers

2007-04-19T08:48:00.000+02:00

I am looking more and more forward to see Hippotizer V3 at Eurovision Song Contest 2007. Most Green Hippo developers are working rather hard to improve V3 especially for Eurovision. It will be the most dignified launch of V3!

The stage in the Eurovision semi-final and final in Helsinki this May will be something totally unforeseen in Finland. The backdrops of the set will be done completely with LED screens sized up to 300 square metres. The design is done by lighting and screen designer Mikki Kunttu.

Kunttu tells the Finnish trade magazine Tekniikka ja Talous that the visual solutions of the stage are creatively based on LED technology. They will make shaping the stage possible in real time according to the different needs of the artists. The displays don’t need to be 16:9 aspect ratio any more and they don’t even need to be rectangles. Curved and round shapes make the LED technology organic. We can even create a see-through backdrop image, says Kunttu.

The Barco Mitrix video screens used in the backdrop are see-through so in theory the action on stage can even be extended behind the screens. The show will be managed by powerful Hippotizer V3 media servers, supplied by the Finnish company West Lighting. The programming for these over dozen servers was started in the first week of April, when the details of the different countries performances were received.

Currently the whole show is made into 3-D models using several types of software, including. ESP Vision and GrandMa.

Hippotizer MediaMaps

2007-04-12T07:49:00.000+02:00

Often, the little things have the biggest impact.

In Hippotizer V1, Green Hippo introduced "MediaMaps" (also known as "Hippotizer Personalities"), which are nothing but XML files that can be read over the network. This XML files contain some information (e.g. Name, Resolution etc.) for each Media (Picture or Movie), and also a reference to a Thumbnail file (which can also be accessed over the network).

This had a big impact on the Lighting Industry: Lighting Consoles (if i remember correctly, the first one was MagicQ from ChamSys) could suddenly display information about Media of MediaServers within their own GUI, which was not at all possible before. This was such a powerful and important improvement that only a very few weeks later, each other MediaServer in the industry supported MediaMaps too - some of them an 1:1 copy of Green Hippos format.

Yesterday I found a nice web article "Fall Out Boy European Tour with MagicQ" that describes the powerful synergy of MagicQ and Hippotizer through simple MediaMaps:

The rig itself comprised 20 Robe ColourSpot 1200ATs, 20 MAC600s, 14 Atomic strobes with scrollers, 20 ChromaQ Colourblock DB4s, 20 LED Par64s, 260 VersaTUBES driven from a Hippotizer plus a variety of moles, generics and dimmers over four universes of ArtNet."

[...]

Esteban spent two days at ChamSys' demo room in Southampton, familiarising himself with the console and pre-programming the lighting and media servers. ChamSys’ demo room has full Capture/WYSIWYG facilities along with both Hippotizer and ArKaos media servers, enabling lighting designers to sample the full benefits of MagicQ without the pressure of a show situation. ChamSys was able to set up visualisation so that Esteban could see exactly how the Hippotizer images would be mapped to the five separate sections of versaTUBE LED array spread around the stage.

[...]

ChamSys has worked very closely with Green Hippo (manufacturers of Hippotizer) to ensure that control of media servers from MagicQ is straightforward. MagicQ supports a special Media Window solely for controlling media servers, which makes it much easier to control several different media servers. You can select media server, media layer, attributes and media content all from the same window. In addition, you can view and select directly on screen the media thumbnails for up to 50 different media servers each with different media content. MagicQ downloads and stores thumbnail previews of the media content from each media server independently and even supports a live preview of the media server output and layers.
Esteban used the media window to feed the camera output and Hippotizer media to playback the show direct to the versaTUBEs on stage, giving the audience a close up view of the action. Esteban commented: “It is so easy to use (MagicQ) to program the media, the thumbnails and live previews make the task much quicker.”

The following two pictures show the MagicQ connectivities and a screenshot of Hippotizer Media Thumbnails (accessed through the MediaMap), displayed in MagicQs GUI.

Hippotizer at Broadways Nokia Theatre

2007-04-10T07:38:00.000+02:00

Unlimited Visibility Lighting Design (UVLD) built a continuous slime loop from animated clips furnished by the network and stored on a Green Hippo Hippotizer Media Server, which triggered display of the content on the LightFrame. The LightFrame’s curtain-like configuration enabled it to both display slime imagery and serve as a virtual slime “dispenser” when people walked through the portal. [Read full article]

Green Hippos best kept Secret

2007-04-01T08:14:00.000+02:00

Hippotizer is often considered to run on Mac - how else could its success in a business environment full of professional designers be explained? Some people spread the rumors that it runs on Windows XP / DirectX, but then again this people have no answer why it runs totally stable and at an unbeatable performance. Well, in V3 there is a trick that reveals the truth:

1) Reset the Hippotizer to its default settings (from the Boot Menu)
2) Shut it down
3) Remove all energy supply
4) Open the case (warning: this is not allowed by contract!)
5) Connect cables and start it up again
6) Import a full HD clip that supports Alpha (it does not work without alpha!) and name it "pixiechicks"
7) Load this clip in Layer 1
8) Select the Effect "Pixies Dust" in Layer 1
9) Use "Matte" Mix Mode in Layer 1
10) Use "Sprite" Mode in Layer 2
11) Use "Max" Mode in all other Layers
12) Use "Live Video" Input in Layer 2
13) Set "Level" of Layers 1 and 2 to 100%, and "Level" of all other layers to 0%
14) Now focus the Graphics Adapter inside the Hippotizer with the Camera attached to the Video Capturing Input of the Hippotizer. As result, you will see on the Hippotizer Output Green Hippos best kept secret: Pixies!

Pixies play a very important role in Hippotizer Media Servers, since they are responsible to mix all the millions of pixels of all Layers in realtime. They run along the pipelines of the GPU *extremely fast*, sitting on electrons and using their radiating color gradients (also known as the electrons spin) which allows them to mix colors and apply effects in breathtaking quality and speed! It's magic really!

Hippotizer V3 Trainings in London

2007-03-31T08:42:00.000+02:00

Green Hippo has announced that it will be holding two 1-day training courses on the new Hippotizer Version 3 media server system in Central London on 23rd and 24th April.

The training days are open to everyone and will cover subjects such as Hippotizer timeline programming, system setup, remote monitoring and a hands on introduction to all the new exciting features to be found the new Version 3 software. The event will be held at RADA in central London, and the cost of the 1 day course will be £25 including, lunch and refreshments.

[Click the Headline for the official announcement with more Info]

Eurovision Song Contest Helsinki 2007

2007-03-29T15:11:00.000+02:00

Yes it's that time of year. Eurovision rolls in again. And this time it's driven well and truly by Hippotizer V3!

The Eurovision Song Contest is well known for debuting new products. As one of the biggest shows on the calendar Green Hippo is proud that Hippotizer V3 will be on the event. This year our friend Mikki Kunttu is the Lighting Designer, with long time Hippotizer disciple Johan West at his side, putting together what looks to be a rather fantastic show!

Blue Man Group goes Hippotizer

2007-03-20T08:00:00.000+01:00

It has already been a while since "Blue Man Group goes Hippotizer", but I didn't have much time to blog about it.

The following passages are copy-pasted from the November 2006 issue of Lighting & Design America:

Scharff Weisberg, which programmed Blue Man Group's last tour and served as design consultants and system engineers for the sit-down shows, furnished How to Be a Megastar Tour 2.0 with three Green Hippo HD players, an iLite 6XP LED wall, Olite 510 LED strip displays, two Christie Roadster S+16 projectors, and a complement of Sony cameras.

The reconceived show marked a move from a Medialon controlled Doremi video playback system to the Hippotizer HD media-server system. "This was a big thing for us," says Glaab. "We'd used servers before with mixed results. But working with Scharff Weisberg and using a system made for video made a huge difference -- the results were amazing. The Hippotizer HDs really made the process of making changes to the show and tweaking cues more streamlined than ever before. Merging the video cues into the grandMA lighting board and having the board operator handle all of the cues also made for a smoother, more efficient process."

"Using the Hippotizer HDs as the front end of the system optimized the content acquisition process" points out Scharff Weisberg project manager John Ackerman. "And combining video and lighting cues in one board without using a separate show control system and operator has tightened up the look of the show and created a more elegant system. The video in a Blue Man Group show is immersive; it's more than just magnifying the staging of a song. It's much more integrated."

[...]

Sean Cagney, Scharff Weisberg's programmer for the show, was challenged by "all the scrolling text" in the content. "It is the most brutal type of video, as it saws against the vertical refresh of video," he explains. Cagney used his technical acumen to overcome the jittery nature of the scrolling text; some cues in the show have four such files played back simultaneously while running at near double speed pulling well over 100 megabytes per second off the RAID system in the Hippotizers. "The machines didn't even bat an eye," Cagney reports.

[...]

Joe Volpe is Scharff Weisberg's assistant project manager for the tour. Dan Bolland is the lighting designer for the tour and Patrick Brannon his programmer; the video road crew includes lead tech/crew chief Sean Kelly, projectionist/cameraman John David Williams, and Hippotizer tech Brandon Oosterhoff.

Speedcubing

2007-02-06T07:58:00.000+01:00

Two weeks before Devcon07 (Green Hippos annual Developers Conference) I picked up a Rubik's Cube (3x3x3). When I was a teenager I knew a (quite unoptimized) way to solve it, but I did not remember all the moves anymore. So I browsed the web to look for some solutions. Besides some really good sources I also learned that "speedcubing" or "solving the cube blindfolded" are quite popular sports. Just for fun I started to learn some simple sequences of moves, which already allows to solve a 3x3x3 cube in less than 2 minutes, as proved at Devcon07 2 weeks later:

Here a list of the much appreciated online sources I found:

Rubik cube standard notation overview. Self explaining.
A Java-Applet that allows you to copy-paste the algorithms in standard notation into the url, and then plays the single steps. Very useful!
Jessica Fridrichs speed cukbing page - Jessica is *the* queen of speedcubing! In the 80s she solved the cube in less than 20 seconds with her method (CFOP)..! Today, there are even more efficient (or at least simpler to learn but not less effective) known methods, but considering that she found all algorithms without the help of a computer nearly 30 years ago, she is absolutely remarkable! I also enjoyed her article "20 years of speedcubing" very much!
An easy-to-memorize solution, already more efficient than most other beginner solutions, since it uses a keyhole-corner in the first layer to solve corners of the last layer.
Lars Petrus - one of the best speedcubers in the world - explains his tricks and system in great detail! A must-see for every seriously addicted speedcuber!
Complete last-layer collection of perfect algorithms made by Bernard Helmstetter.
Lars Vandenbergh's Cube Zone. A site with lots of wonderful lookup tables of advanced algorithms (ZB F2L, OLL, PLL, COLL) made by Belgiums No. 1 speedcuber!
Gilles and his Cubes: A simple beginners method as well as an exotic but very advanced method (called roux) - very well illustrated! The video section there is also very cool!
And if all that still does not feel like a real challenge to you, then here is a guide for solving NxNxN cubes, or you might even want to solve a 4D cube! :-D

My personal mix from all the systems above is the following:

Use Lars Petrus method for the first two layers (F2L), including the orientation of the edges of the last layer (steps 1 - 4).
Use COLL (well, there is still some work to learn all the moves, but even if you just know a few it is already no problem to solve the whole cube) to position and orient the corners of the last layer (LL), without changing the orientation of the already oriented edges. In some special cases I prefer OLL + PLL (just the simple ones that don't affect the edges at all) rather than COLL.
In the final step, position the edges, as described by Lars Petrus in step 7.

How to become a Member of Green Hippo

2006-11-28T08:19:00.000+01:00

Now and then people ask me how to become a member of Green Hippo. Well, actually it is quite simple and not a secret. All you have to to is to fulfill the following requirements:

1) Be passionated about Green Hippo. Get the vibe!
2) Be honest. It is the key to respect and success.
3) Have fun! No matter whether you are on the sales front or lost somewhere between bits and bytes. Remember to have a good time, all the time!

Easy, isn't it? However, there is one little thing you should know too... ...it is called THE TEST... ...and not many have successfully passed it yet...

Second Life vs. First Life

2006-11-16T08:51:00.000+01:00

About 3 weeks ago, 'Second Life' made it into the top 10 of Google Zeitgeist. Searching the web soon revealed that I am quite old fashioned, not having heard about it before.

Second Life is a virtual 3-D world inhabited by millions of residents. It’s current population of about 1.4 million inhabitants makes it one of the fastest-growing online communities. In Second Life, people can create their own characters—called avatars—to do a variety of things they can do in the real world, and lots of things they cannot do in the real world (e.g. flying like a bird). Characters can participate in meetings and conferences, work, play and shop just as they do (or don’t) in their everyday lives. One of the driving forces is that players can create their own in-game content (it can only be created within the game itself), and you can then sell it. Such in-game content can be 3d objects (e.g. virtual clothes, jewelery, houses etc.), body motions (guess what...), or little in-game programs (e.g. a casino).

Firms like Dell also participate in Second Life. Others, e.g. Fortune, BusinessWeek and CNN, benefit from just writing about it. On the front page of Second Life, you see how many US$ have been spent during the last 24h. Right now, while writing this, it is more than half a million US$! Second Life uses its own currency - Linden Dollars - but you can exchange them directly with real money.

One evening, I gave Second Life a try. From a programmers and a conceptual point of view, the game is amazing. It is fun exploring the world and meet people, and as a programmer I instantly felt teased to also explore the possibilities of making money with creating and programming stuff and... ...but wait a minute... ...why is it called Second Life? This somehow implies that there must be a First Life too?

Second Life is a disguised one-armed bandit. Instead of inserting coins, you feed it with the time of your First Life. The more time you have spent, the more you will feel like you have to spend even more (to get anything back). And the longer you play, the harder to stop, because you then have to admit that you have wasted a whole lot of your time for what? Nothing!

Follow my example and delete your Second Life account right now, and have a good time with your First Life friends or family.

Happy End: Hippotizer in Switzerland

2006-11-13T08:53:00.000+01:00

I have been waiting for years to see the Hippotizer being distributed and used in Switzerland.

It was in the year 2000 when my friends Chris and Yannick and I made quite a lot of presentations at Swiss branches of Sony, Toshiba, Panasonic, Siemens etc., in order to make some good deals with visualJockey. We also tried to team up with Switzerland's biggest Multimedia Hardware suppliers such as Winkler, Decatron and Habegger. In best case they were only laughing about us, in worst case they exploited us.

Being a prophet in the home town is never easy!

In 2001, visualJockey and the remaining programmers (Vadim and me) were bought by Green Hippo, and a new product called the 'Hippotizer' was developed all together. About 4 years later, Hippotizer finally got its own distributor 'IQ unlimited' here in Switzerland. And the firms mentioned above are now buying and renting it from there! :-D

The Swiss don't trust that something as innovative as visualJockey or Hippotizer can come from Switzerland itself, it has to come from a foreign metropolis such as London, and needs an exotic touch. Congratulations and my deepest respect to the marketing of Green Hippo and IQ unlimited! :-)

It is never too late for a Happy End! :-)

Below some pictures from Hippotizer at the Montreux Jazz Festival 2006 - operated by Switzerlands Hippotizer master himself: Peter from IQ unlimited.

Destiny's Child Live! - Survivor

2006-11-13T08:11:00.000+01:00

Online Videos of Live Acts where Video Projections and LEDs are controlled with Hippotizers are rare. But it seems that I have just found one at YouTube!

Destiny's Child has fallen in love with the Hippotizer in 2005! :-)

Albert Einstein was right

2006-11-10T09:11:00.000+01:00

I recently kept an eye on Google Zeitgeist - statistics about the most recently used keywords in Googles search engine.

First of all, I have my doubts about this statistics. Everybody knows that Sex sells, as proved by statistics. There are no corresponding keywords in Google Zeitgeist. With a pigeon or two, Google seems to filter the keywords that would reveal the truth.

Second, the resulting keywords after the filtering (on an international level) are making me think. Seasonal topics like "Halloween" and celebrities like "Sandy Koufax", "Cindy Margolis" or "Mario Lemieux" (I never heard of them before!!) are dominating over worldwide politics. The cry of 16000 children that die every day because of hunger (one child every 5 seconds) remains unheard, and complex global problems such as climate change, energy, global dislocation or weapons of mass destruction are to be addressed tomorrow rather than today.

Some years ago, I remember that the following mathematical joke (which was said to be invented by Albert Einstein) was spread through EMails:

Time = Money (Well known fact)
Wisdom = Power (Well known fact)
Power = Work / Time (Physics)

This can be transformed into:

-> Wisdom = Work / Time
-> Wisdom = Work / Money
-> Money = Work /Wisdom

In other words: the more you work, and the less you know, the more money you will make! :-)

If we substitute '1/Wisdom' by 'Stupidity' then we get
-> Money = Work * Stupidity

Whereas Googles financial success and Google Zeitgeist are a direct prove of this formula.

q.e.d.

Hippotizer V2 References

2006-10-31T08:30:00.000+01:00

People keep asking me about Hippotizer (V2) references. Today about 100 Hippotizer V2 Mediaservers are used worldwide. It is hard to track where and how exactly they are used. My favorite source of information is either direct information from the Green Hippo sales people, or the Google search engine.

I have put the best documented Hippotizer V2 references into a pdf document, which can be downloaded here. Enjoy!

Demo Nostalgia

2006-10-18T08:12:00.000+02:00

My personal roots of gfx programming are in the demoscene.

Recently, some of my favorite old DOS demos have been captured, saved as AVI, and published online. Even today - up to 13 years later - some of them feature impressive effects or are just fun watching because of the nostalgic feelings that come up.

And as far as I can remember, they even looked smoother on my old Intel 486 rather than the todays AVIs due to several reasons:

The AVI codecs suffer by some compression artefacts.
The pixels on todays Flatscreen are too sharp, while the pixels on the old monitors got a bit of a nice blurry twist.
They run in sync to the vertical refresh of the old monitors (about 60Hz) rather than the captured 25fps).

However, it is so great to get the spirit of the good old days back on screen! Enjoy!

Triton - Cristal Dream II

EMF - Verses

Cubic Team and $een - Toasted

Nooon - Stars - Wonders of the World

Carillon Cyberiad - Inside

Psychic Link & ACME - Paper

Dubius - Machines of Madness

Rage - Robotnik

Future Crew - Second Reality

The evolution of Digital Art - Part 3: Lights & Media Servers

2006-08-22T17:34:00.000+02:00

The History of Lights

In the good old days, lights were just lights. They could be turned on ond off. Well, it was also possible to control the brightness. Later came different colors of lights, mechanically moved lights (aka moving lights), gobos, and of course also the combination of all. But the major changes concerning lights in the professional lighting industry definitely happened during the last 5 years:

The manufacturing prices of videoprojectors decreased, and the light power (ansi lumen) increased. Thus, traditional lights (e..g. in clubs) are more and more replaced by video projectors.
LED based output medias became very popular. They are extremely bright, cheap, trendy and even energy friendly.

Controlling complex Setups

In order to control complex setups of lights (up to a few hundret lights!), Lighting Desks were developed. Lighting Desks allow to control every single light out of many, or many lights bundled together. The protocol used to send/receive signals to/from a light is called DMX (if you have never heard about DMX, think about something similar to MIDI). DMX has been designed quite simple in the beginning and has quickly been accepted as a standard in the industry, but it cannot satisfy todays requirements. Thus, today a few DMX variations exist - each of them more or less dirthy hacks or workarounds to overcome some initial DMX restrictions. A new protocol called ACN is currently evaluated and will hopefuly be released and accepted in the industry as a new standard soon.

Media Servers

Because today modern setups of lights often contain video projectors and/or LEDs, there had to be a way to control the content that is displayed on this output medias: e.g. to display pictures or play videos. Obviously, some kind of computers that feed the outputmedias were needed. In the professional lighting industry, this computers are meanwhile simply called 'Media Servers'. They typically receive DMX signals from the Lighting Desk, and based on the signals they will feed the attached output media(s) (e.g. a video projector or a LED wall) with a mix of pictures, videos and/or realtime effects.

The worldwide global players of professional media servers are:

Hippotizer (PC, DirectX) from Green Hippo
Pandoras Box (PC, DirectX) from Coolux
Catalyst (Mac, OpenGL) from Highend

Whenever you see a big multimedia spectacle (e.g. live concert from Robbie Williams, or a TV show with lots of video projections and LEDs (e.g. Pop Idol in England, or Deutschland sucht den Superstar in Germany etc.) you can be pretty sure that the video projections and animations on the LEDs are controlled by one of the three above Media Servers.

Catalyst is - according to my personal analysis and knowledge - based on software structures that cannot compete with the Hippotizer or Pandoras Box, but it covers the basic requirements of playing/mixing videos and DMX input processing quite well.

Pandoras Box and the Hippotizer are technically both based on similar Hardware (PC with fast Graphics Adapter) and Software (DirectX based), and both of them offer tons of realtime effects and additional features (e.g. remote control, softedge blending of multiple projectors etc.) besides simple video playback/mixing and DMX processing.
With Pandoras Box Media Vision, Coolux currently concentrates on the development of a solution combining a lighting desk and media server, which makes the handling of small scaled setups very effective.
With the development of 'HippoNet', Green Hippo currently enhances the possibilities of the next generation Hippotizers in a way to create and control the most complex setups, where traditional setups with simple hierarchies of Lighting Desks and Media Servers failed.

More than 20 Hippotizers are used in the currently probably biggest worldwide multimedia spectacle: Cirque du Soleils show 'Love' in the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas. It is a very impressive example for the usage of Media Servers.

Some quotes from online articles about the show:

http://www.plsn.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1161&Itemid=228

"Large-scale images cascade in sync with the music throughout most of Love, requiring a robust projection rig. The projections are run via a dedicated grandMA console, located in the projection booth, with 20 Green Hippo Hippotizer HD dual-output media servers with custom software doing the digital manipulations, and 20 DPI HIGHlite 12000Dsx projectors in five sets, double stacked on each side of the theatre for extra punch on two 103' wide × 20' curved screens that stretch along the north and south wall of the theatre (the same images are seen on both screens), pumping up to 250,000 lumens of light."

"To create birds that fly in a natural way for “Yesterday,” Laporte used Green Hippo's flocking program that allows the CGI birds to follow a target by using a joystick. This was developed in conjunction with Sean Westgate and the Green Hippo programming team. While Laporte worked on the ideas for various images, his media guru, Luc Lavergne, worked out the technical solutions."

http://livedesignonline.com/mag/love_need/

"There are 28 Green Hippo Hippotizer media servers all synched together. It borrows technology from video gaming and allows LaPorte to use eight different layers of high-definition images. “I’m able to tweak the color, the contrast, put in some effects—all in real time,” he says. “So where as before I was always going back to the editing room to make changes, now I can follow the rhythm of a creation. If I decide to change the color completely, go to a dual-tone effect or reduce the speed, I can do it all in real-time. For me, it is a big, big step for the creation of a live show."

The following is a photo of the live performance. In the background you see one of the huge curved screens, 40 meters in width.

And here a photo of the backstage with the Hippotizer rendering farm... :D

The evolution of Digital Art - Part 2: VJs

2006-04-17T17:10:00.000+02:00

In the late 1990s, when the DJs already were very popular, another subculture
of visual digital art called the VJs (similar to DJ standing for Disc-Jockey, VJ stands
for Video-Jockey or Visual-Jockey) raised.

Whereever there is a visual output medium (e.g. a big screen in a club or a LED wall at an opendoor gig), a VJ - whose job is filling the screen with nice visuals - is not far away. VJing can be done with various tools and equipment. In the simplest case this would just be a video player. In a more interesting setup, various videosources (among them computers producing visual output) are mixed together with videomixers (e.g. the famous Edirol V4.)

With the growing performance of PC Hardware, various VJ softwares have been written, and many of them claim to be all-in-one-solutions to create, playback, mix and even record all kind of visuals - which is according to my own experience nearly never true, or at least not on a satisfying level.

Basically, a typical VJ-software features many parameters to select and switch between:

Resources: images, movies, 3d objects/scenes, generative patterns

Transitions: change from one resource to the other in a more or less spectacular way

Effects: changing colors/shapes/geometry/3d transformation etc.

Mixmodes: overlaying different layers, e.g. a movie in the background with a 3d object in the foreground

Most VJ softwares have a sophisticated GUI that allows to access many predefined parameters directly, but since most VJ softwares also allow to access the parameters over specified inputs (typically MIDI) many VJs prefer to control the parameters with third-party equipment. Popular and relatively cheap but good third party MIDI devices are e.g. BCF2000 or Faderfox.

Although the combination of VJ Software on a MAC/PC and an external MIDI device can be understood as the VJ-standard and already results in interesting possibilities, such a setup suffers by the following drawbacks (based on my very own VJ experience during the last 6 years):

The amount of parameters of the MIDI device are usually quite limited. While good VJ softwares usually feature hundrets of parameters, most mobile MIDI devices usualy only allow to access a limited amount of banks with a maximum of 128 parameters (MIDI channels) simultaneously. Even with enough MIDI channels in several banks, the mapping is a cumbersome process. Dedicated MIDI devices, especially created to fit with the parameters of a corresponding VJ Software, such as e.g. the ReACT VJ Controller from Netzteil (designed to work well together with the VJ Software Resolume) overcome this problem.
When the MIDI protocol was designed, it was not intended to be used for VJ applications. Therefore, a MIDI channel usually only has a resolution of 7 bits. In order to understand the consequences, let's analyze what happens if we map a MIDI channel to a 'Rotation' parameter of a VJ software (which rotates a 2d image between -180° and +180°). Assume 'Rotation' was intended to allow smooth rotations even in high resolutions (1600x1200 pixels). The necessary precision of such a rotation is a minimum delta of about 0.1°. This means that for a smooth rotation over 360°, at least a 12bit signal would be needed. But MIDI has only 7bits, which means that the smallest possible change of the value of the MIDI channel will result in a rotation-jump of 2.8°! This means that a smooth continous rotation cannot be done slower than 70°/second (or, in other words: about one full rotation every 5 seconds). Any kind of slower rotation will look like a hicking framerate below 25 frames per second (independant of the real FPS). So, MIDI is pretty useless for a 1:1 mapping between MIDI channels and VJ software parameters. How do VJs deal with this? Well, most of them don't bother about it and simply got used to it. Some VJs argue that they act in smoky clubs, when not only a bigscreen but also all kind of lights are flashing, and probably 90% of the halfstoned audience does not remark drawbacks in smooth parameter changes anyways (and their visuals are stored in low resolution anyways)... ...but I also know other VJs who work in other environments (e.g. at exhibition stands of Mercedes) where quality matters!

Nearly every VJ Software claims to have the best performance, most effects supported, easiest to use GUI etc. Obviously, not everybody can be number 1. I don't want to make a ranking list here, but there are some simple things to be said about performance, effects, GUIs, automation etc., and I would like to explain them using VisualJockey (developed in 1999-2003) as a reference.

Performance
Talking about performance unfortunately means talking about bottlenecks. The typical performance bottleneck of any VJ Software consists in calculations that are done with the CPU rather than the GPU, and thus must access system memory (system RAM) rather than memory on the GFX adapter. As soon as there is a memory transfer from GFX memory to system memory and back, this becomes the ultimate bottleneck - the higher the pixelresolution the more obvious the drop of the framerate. The rendering kernel of VisualJockey is a highly optimized system memory engine, and most of its plugin are MMX optimised (64bit, which means that always 2 32bit pixels are processed simultaneously, even on old (and non officially) 64bit systems!) to the max. Before the aera of pixelshader version 2.0, VisualJockey was one of the best performing VJ systems: it could decode up to about 4 layers of Movies (PAL resolution, = 720x576@25fps), and using several tricks, it could add lots of effects and also mix all layers together (all with about 30FPS, on a PIV 3GHz). It does (except for some additional plugin packages) not use the GPU at all, which means that it just runs fine with cheap old GFX adapters( without any 3d chips needed at all). What really matters on such a system is a fast CPU and a big and fast L2 cache - this commonly applies to all system-memory based VJ Softwares.

However, with pixelshader version 2 compatible graphic adapters, nearly all 2D effects can be processed smoother an faster (many pixels in parallel, hardware accelerated) and in higher resolutions on the GPU, and the result can directly be used as a texture in complex 3d scenes (or simple 3D effects), without additional memory transfer. Most developers of VJ Software have meanwhile realized this, and it is only a question of time until effects get recoded as pixelshaders and the software rendering pipelines get adapted to juggle with 3d surfaces, rendertargets and textures rather than system-memory-buffers. However, as long as there is only one single system-memory-buffer based effect in the whole software rendering pipeline, the bottleneck of expensive system-memory transfer still remains. It is important to note that this also applies for the "Video Decoding": there is no way to directly decode videostreams into GFX-memory for software based on OpenGL (where frames must be copied from system memory to GFX memory after decoding); this is currently only possible under DirectX (using DirectShow,VMR9 DS-Filter). Many programmers, Linux- and Mac-users are not aware of this, but it is no surprise that there is a difference between a platform independent architecture (OpenGL) and a platformspecific but more optimised architecture (DirectX). Because video decoding is such an essential part of VJ software, it must clearly be pointed out here that all VJ Softwares which use OpenGL pay this certain penatly in performace.
This does not mean that such VJ Softwares are performing bad, but it means that they will not scale in resolutions and layers (e.g. only 4 simultaneous layers of PAL video, rather than 8, and problems with HD video decoded simultaneously in multiple layers).

The speed of decoding videostreams itself mainly depends on the used codec. For VJing it is better to NOT use super-compressing codecs, because they will need more hardware resources for decoding. And the implementation of different codecs can vary quite a lot by different manufacturers too: only very few take advantage of hardware accelerated decoding and are optimised to be used with VMR9 (e.g. nVidias Pure VideoDecoder, which even works well on ATI cards :-)).

Effects
Effects, effects, effects... ...there can never be enough effects! Everybody likes them, everybody wants them. No doubts, there was a real effect-boost in the history of VJing when "Freeframe"
- an open-source cross-platform real-time video effects plugin system - was started by Pete Warden. Based on a simple C++ API, (system-memory based) Freeframe effects
can be hosted in any VJ Software that provides a corresponding wrapper (such as e.g. VisualJockey :-)). On the one hand, many interesting Freeframe packages are around, but on the other hand Freeframe exactly suffers by the performance problems mentioned above. There are discussions about "Freeframe 2" (aka Freeframe GPU), which will specify a crossplatform API that allows hardware accelerated effects using OpenGL. Unfortunately, this will again not result in ultimate performance, because of the mentioned video decoding problems related with OpenGL.

GUIs and Automation
Some VJ softwares such as e.g. VisualJockey do not provide predefined functionality concerning resource-, transitions-, effect-, and mixmode selection, nor do they force its users to use a predefined GUI for live shows or direct mapping of parameters. Instead, they just offer
the users a GUI with plenty of possibilities to design and arrange unique rendering-pipelines (in VisualJockey they are called FXCs) where all possibilities of resource/transition/effect/mixmode can be scripted and later remotecontrolled through whatever peripheral the user likes. On top of that, they offer functionality to define event-driven playlists, where sequences of events and corresponding actions (e.g. a smooth continuous rotation) can be triggered with input signals - typically MIDI. Although this requires additional understanding and more preparation time for a show, many advanced VJs would not want to live anymore without such powerful "internal processing and scripting concepts". And as a nice side-effect, such concepts also allow all kind of automation besides the normal "live VJing".

Good examples of such automation made with a customized version of Hippotizer (version 1)/VisualJockey (version 3.5) were realized by Luc Lavergne and Yan Breuleux: Ars Natura, Black Box. Another good example was 'Cyberhelvetia' at Expo02 in Switzerland, made with vvvv.

In any case - be it live VJing or automated setups - the beauty and professionalism of digital art has constantly grown, and VJing has become extremely popular. The nicest thing about VJing is that the resulting digital art is not at all predefined but truely realtime, always dependent on direct or indirect human interaction, and is thus the longer the more also understood and accepted as a new kind of art.

The following shows some pictures of one of my early VJ gigs (Energy 2002, Switzerland, about 16000+ attenders). The reason why I present this and not another event is because some key people from Green Hippo especially came to Switzerland to test the very first beta Version of Hippotizer V1, and it turned out to be mind-blowing!

Some (but not all!) control monitors from the VJ corner.

...and the start of the success story of the Hippotizer! ;-)

...the audience...

The hall was full of nice lighting effects all the time!

And this funny gentlement are nobody else than James Ross Heron and Sean Westgate - the founders of the company Green Hippo.

Oh and who's that guy on the left? It's Peter Kaufmann (aka pDoom) - the legendary coder of some stunning demos, the hacker of DM2, and meanwhile Lead Programmer of Green Hippo in London. The guy on the right is again James Ross Heron.
The next photo shows me and my friend Vadim Gorbatenko - the mysterious russian scientist working for Green Hippo somewhere deep in the snowy forests in Sibiria (Tomsk). I am still very proud that I got him to travel to Switzerland just for this event. It seems that he was a bit jet-lagged but also very amazed about the stunning output of the Hippotizers.

The guy in the middle (with the unblue T-shirt) is Kay Huber - my school day friend, who taught me programming gfx effects while attending the Geography courses at Gymnasium.

And finally, some snapshots of the big screen, showing some VJ output. The big screen was in fact so big, that it was impossible to fully get it into camera... :-)

James from Green Hippo also made a nice short videoclip!

The evolution of Digital Art - Part 1: The Demoscene

2006-03-01T18:08:00.000+01:00

Preface
Digital Art has attracted me since ever, most of all realtime animations. With the existence of processors, this new form of art was born. Fiendishly clever programmers have been (ab)using processors for creating artistic audiovisual output with no other purpose than beeing nice! I decided to write a serie of articles about the evolution of Digital Art.

This first article is dedicated to the demoscene, one of the most interesting subcultures of pure digital (realtime) art. The demoscene itself is a wide topic, some people have even written a whole book about it, and you will find many online articles (e.g. Thomas Gruetzmachers 'PC Demoscene FAQ') dealing with the topic. In order to keep things concise, I will try to give my own brief summary.

The demoscene has its roots in hacking the copyprotection of software (preferrably games, first seen in the late 1970s), and adding little audiovisual teasers called 'cracktros' at the startup of the corresponding software. Such cracktros became very popular on the C64 and on the AMIGA. Besides cracktros, some programmers founded groups who concentrated on programming audiovisual effects only, rather than hacking. All this groups - most of them consisting of programmers, musicians and graphicians - formed the demoscene.

Since the 1990s, demoscene groups are challenging each other at well organised partie s with whole sequences of stunning audiovisual effects - called intros and demos. Intros have to fit into limited filesize boundaries, while the much bigger filesize (~x10) filesize of demos gives the groups more freedom in adding content that is hard to compress (e.g. vocals in sound, images and short video footage that can't be generated synthetically, etc.). However, many intros (e.g. 'Heaven7', '.the .product', 'Zoom 3' or
'Candytron') proove again and again that 64k is enough to create impressing and stylish digital realtime artwork!

Rather old, but probably the most famous (DOS-) demo ever is 'Second Reality' made by Future Crew in 1993. Looking at the 'Second Reality' today (e.g. through Demoscene TV) might not look that impressive anymore, but in 1993 the graphics and sound simply were revolutionary. The success of newer demos such as e.g. 'The Popular Demo', '195/95', 'Pla net Risk' or 'Iconoclast' much depends on the artwork made by the graphicians (which are not seldom the programmers themselves!) as well as up-to-date (but from a technical point of view not really revolutionary) 3D/2D-Engines.

However, some productions still strike with remarkable coding ideas ("the code IS the style"), such as e.g. 'We Cell', or the intro 'Bugtro'!

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to enjoy ancient demos from the 1980s and 1990s under Windows 9x/XP, Mac or Linux. Some groups (e.g. 'Doomsday', 'fudge') have meanwhile ported their demos to win32 executables, other old classical demos such as e.g. '303' & 'Tribes' can be run fine under Windows XP using emulators. The DemoDVD project concentrates on the creation of DVDs, in order to playback old and new demoscene candy with an usual DVD player.

The releases of the demoscene are countless, and many others had deserved to be mentioned here (e.g. releases of the groups 'Mandula', 'The Black Lotus', 'Calodox', just to mention a few).

For more news and archieved releases I recomend to visit www.scene.org!

First things first

2006-02-20T08:51:00.000+01:00

Hello World!

I decided to start this "Healthy Geek! :-)" - Blog in order to share tips and tricks in programming and daily life with as many people as possible. I hope this will become a friendly, useful and much loved meeting place for you and me.

Starting a new Blog is never easy. There are a couple of things that attract/upset people right at the beginning. So, probably the best way to deal with that is to address some critical topics right at start.

Some words about Blogger.com. One of the tricky decisions one has to make, is to decide for a Blogengine. I decided to use Blogger.com, mainly because it is very easy to use and maintain. Blogger allows me to concentrate 100% on blogging, without having to worry about trends and features in future or to maintain a server infrastructure myself. It is 100% free of charge. Of course, one can say the same about many other Blogengines, but knowing that Blogger is owned by a monstercompany such as Google gives it an additional bonus in popularity. Besides that, I definitely like the geeky history of blogger very much!

Some words about Advertising. Adverts in Blogs or on webpages in general are very argumentative. Here is my point of view:

It is essential to understand how the world we live in works. Firms with useful (and sometimes very unuseful) products decide to spend a lot of money for the promotion of their products. Their success significantly depends on advertising.
The internet has become one of the most important platforms for this purpose.
Innovative firms such as Google (whether you like Google or not, I have to tip my hat to the ideas the people working at Google have had and have implemented so well!) have created context-driven advertising systems (in the case of Google it is called AdSense), which makes it possible to automatically display adverts of products that match with the content of a website (the more content on a website, the better the matching). The impact of such clever technology on our daily life is maybe even bigger than we are aware of.
I peronsally decided to jump on this train and to allow advertising on this blog, with the hope that the adverts will lead people to other interesting websites with products they really are interested in! If you never heard about AdSense, I recommend to research it, it might be useful for your own Webpage/Blog too!

And finally, some words about myself. My name is Josua Hönger, I live in Switzerland and I am working as a programmer (mainly C++, MFC, C#, HLSL) for Green Hippo Ltd., London. Please check out my CV for more information about my education and career.
Since May 2005, I am happily married. Besides working, my wife and I enjoy dancing, swimming, travelling and cooking as our common hobbies.