Einstein VideoPlayer is a project that I initiated during a dance performance entitled “Einstein Dreams” created by Rui Horta. All this took place at Göteborg Opera in Sweden, September of 2010.
Einstein is not just a tool to play videos, it allows anyone to play a list of videos, cross fading between them, with the possibility to adjust the video output to many kinds of surfaces.
“Content is king”, I believe that this tool can be an ice breaker to anyone that intends to playback videos in thousands of different manners.
This is the first public release, however this will always be a work in progress project, and being open source we intend that you use, modify, hack and share this tool.
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List of features available ATM:
– playlist with file names;
– parametric crossfade between videos;
– parametric fade in and out to black and/or white;
– keystone / corner-pin adjustment;
– record and load custom presets.
Future versions will include:
– mask overlay with a PNG with transparency;
– independent multiplayer system (optional);
– one player as Master and the other player as Slave (optional);
– customization for several outputs;
– edge-blend;
– subtitle overlay;
– Improve modularity for fast prototyping and custom projects;
– Improve performance;
– Create the same GUI paradigm to control audio and light;
– Cue list to control everything;
– MIDI, DMX and OSC protocol to control Einstein, and to be controlled by Einstein.
Being a visual artist, I mainly create visual contents and environments for dance, theatre, music and opera performances. Sometimes this contents are supposed to fill non-regular surfaces, and having a tool that could output videos and reshape this videos was a must to have.
I didn’t found any software that allows me to do all this on an easy fashion, and the solutions I found were all very expensive. During two months, I was all alone in a swedish apartment and spent almost all my time creating visual environments for the show, on the spare time I developed this software for video performance.
To work with video, MAX Jitter proved to be the best tool ever since, and because I am not a sophisticated programmer I could never achieve such a thing in c++ or any similar language. And Jitter proved to be very robust for this tasks and I proudly say that it never, NEVER crashed.
During the Einstein Dreams rehearses I needed to have a multi videoplayer system with the following features:
– playlist with file names;
– parametric crossfade between videos;
– parametric fade in and out to black and/or white;
– play a video forward and backward;
– extreme keystone adjustment;
– mask overlay with a PNG with transparency;
– one player as Master and the other player as Slave (optional);
– modularity for customization in future projects.
I decided to call it Einstein Videoplayer, in a tribute to this amazing season in Sweden.
Because I could achieve almost all this by searching on the internet, talking with amazing people at the cycling74 forums, reusing and hacking examples I found, now I want to return to the community what I was able to achieve with it’s help and contribution!
I have been using Einstein Videoplayer on many projects, and since I founded Artica with André Almeida, this software evolved a lot, more features were added like edge-blend, subtitle overlay, dmx512 protocol, OSC protocol, performance improved, cuelist system, physical sensors and Arduino inputs, and much more features are on the pipeline to be added.
“Flowering Tree”, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2010
“Flowering Tree”, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2010
“Paint Me”, Fundação Culturgest, 2010
