Flowmixer

Flowmixer is a customization of FreeJ‘s Mac OSX GUI - an instrument for realtime video manipulation used in the fields of dance teather, veejaying, medical visualisation and TV. The Flowmixer allows to mix a camera, up to eight video/movie/stream inputs, text and generated graphics with common practices (zoom, filter, overlay, etc.) in realtime. The resulting video can be displayed full-screen, saved to disk and/or streamed live to the internet. Advanced features include JavaScript interpretation which provides for automating and serves to extend functionality.

The Flowmixer is heavily based on FreeJ. It implements a graphical user-interface for easy use and interface to video-filters available on OSX. It also comes with presets for direct use with TheArtCollider.

FreeJ itself is a multi-platform application and library offering bindings for multiple scripting languages (fi. python, ruby, JavaScript). FreeJ supports audio playback and analysis as well as various input devices (joystick, wiimote, etc) - however most of these features are not accessible via the Flowmixer GUI on OSX.

We stand on the shoulders of giants: development of FreeJ involved since 2001 many dedicated developers.

Grab the latest version from http://theartcollider.net/software/. It’s known to works on OSX 10.5 and 10.6 both PPC and Intel.

GNU/Linux users can download freeJ or on Debian based distributions (such as Ubuntu) install the package: apt-get install freej.

Flowmixer/FreeJ is available in terms of the GNU General Public License. You can access the source via git://theartcollider.org/flowmixer or download a tar.gz snapshot of the source-repository.

The Flowmixer is intended to be intuitive but also optimized to require as little clicks as possible.. Once you found out that you can click on the thumbnail image to open a context menu, everything should fall into place.

Here’s a short walk-through:

• Launch the Flowmixer
• press “Load” below one of the little black boxes named file input
• select some video-file & press OK → A thumbnail of the video will appear in the box
• click on the thumbnail image
• toggle the “Show” button → the video will visible in the main-viewer and is played in a loop
• ramp up the InputAm slider on the bottom to use some Video-Filter. The effect will be visible instantly in the Output window.
• move your mouse away from the video-settings window and it will disappear
• in the Stream-Tab (bottom right in the main window) set a project-name (don’t use white-spaces), Tags (comma separated), etc and press Start. The output window will be sent live to the ArtCollider. It will show up in the monitoring and the project yellow pages.
• open other videos, launch a web-cam, change the video-filters..

have fun.

Should you have questions don’t hesitate to ask for help and support on

• http://groups.google.com/group/theartcollider - TheArtCollider discussion group

The “Load Script” button at the bottom allows to read and interpret JavaScript files.

A collection of example scripts is available with the source. Check out the annoted star.js script for starters. A complete reference of the scripting API can be found on the FreeJ Website.