videoplayer – Guilherme Martins

Einstein VideoPlayer

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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Link to Artica’s Github

DIRECT DOWNLOAD EINSTEIN v1

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CLICK THE IMAGE TO SEE IN FULL RESOLUTION

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.

Continue reading Einstein VideoPlayer

Pedro e Inês

Artica was invited by the very popular theater company Teatro O Bando, to create visual scenes to the performance “Pedro e Inês”.

It’s a play about a forbidden love during the Portuguese monarchy in the 14th century, and to better portray certain scenes during the perfomance we were asked to create peculiar visual stuff: fire, deers, rain and other realms to transport the viewer to the peace..it was a “wow” experience! What else could I ask for!?

One of the big challenge’s was the screen, wich wasn’t the conventional white screen, it was a translucent screen, a grid, and due to its reflective nature it turns out to be spectacular for our projections.

Once again we used our “Einstein Video Player” (the same we used in Paint Me) with a couple of enhancements and optimizations:
Performance;
Keystone and VideoPlane manipulation;
Control the application via TouchOSC.

We will talk more about this very soon for sure!!

“Pedro e Inês” is traveling around Portugal, you can check the dates here.

And finally here’s a quick sneak peek to behind the scenes:

Flowering Tree (from sketch to the real world)

This all started with Rui Horta’s idea of having a physical tree on stage that would support my visual projections. Rui Horta came up with a drawing and I quickly put it to 3D and sent to the great artist and set designer João Paulo Araújo who made this great master piece!

After the tree was finally built, I’ve made the first projection test, for this I created a program in Jitter, where I have a video running on the background, and on the foreground a .png transparent mask with the tree silhouette.

Everything fitted perfectly! We were astonished!!

For the subtitles I’ve created another program in Jitter that could run videos on the background and on the foreground the subtitles could be displayed and crossfaded one next to each another. Another cool feature of this program is the ability to run videos at different speedrates, this was very useful because most of the videos were created in sync with the music, was a bit tricky to sync the video with the orchester and chorus but not impossible. Another great help came from the composer João Godinho who was by my side telling me when to swap to the next subtitle.

Finally after one month of crazy hard-working days, and with a final week of non-stop working, troubleshooting, finetunning and problem solving everything worked so smoothed on the premiere, we were all thrilled and excited!!

Big thanks to André Almeira, André Sier and Sérgio Ferreira who are great tech advisors and always gave positive inputs.

I must also mention that the Gulbenkian crew was absolutely fantastic, without their help this epic task wouldn’t been achievable!

Click here if you want to see more photos.