Concussion

Concussion from dep on Vimeo.

Concussion from dep on Vimeo.
For a few years now, I've been involved in Concussion Crew, a breakbeat oriented group from my town, Tampere. Concussion's got a radio show on NuBreaks every two weeks (podcast archive). In addition, we try to put together dubstep/drum'n'bass/breaks/etc parties when we can. The last such occasion was on October the 16th. The night was a blast, as you can hopefully gather from these pictures by Jussi Punamäki:

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I enjoy parties where I have a bit more time to prepare and plan ahead, which is one of the reasons that I like working as part of the Concussion collective. This time, we'd taken inspiration from the header image at our website, and gathered some old televisions to use as stage decorations.

 

The TV's were fed an image from vvvv, through a karlklomp style dirty mixer where it was mixed with the output from an aptly named Video Technology Rhythmic 8 synthesizer. The raw combination of the sound to the composite video signal results in some nice glitches, that can be controlled quite well with the synth's features. A nice point about the installation was that all parts were recycled.

Valmet Children glitch workshop

As I promised in a previous post, here's a little more info on the Valmet Children installation we had prepared for AltParty. First, here's a video report by visy and me:

Well, there is a tour of the setup at the beginning of the video, but for those who want to know more, here are some links:

• the Sorbuscope, by tejeez
• "Analog video mixer", which you might recognize as the DVM-1000 of a previous post
• Slit-scan patch made in Pure Data, by visy
• The "Adjustable video effect unit", aka. the glitcher, is nothing but a dirty mixer. Check out the video from Karl Klomp to find out more.

WJ-MX10 Luma key mod

I finally got around to attempting to add luma key capabilities to my video mixer. My device is, in fact, a Blaupunkt DVM-1000, but since it is a 1:1 clone of the Panasonic WJ-MX10, and the MX10 is far more popular, I will refer to it as an MX10.
So what's this project all about? Well, the MX10 has the ability to key out elements based on luminance ("luma key"). However, you cannot use the other video channel as the background - only a solid color. This is pretty stupid, but luckily, there is a relatively easy mod that's supposed to get one around this limitation. Having tried it, I can say that not only does it work, it actually adds a lot more creative potential to the device than I ever hoped for, becase the way it works is that the "White" channel is replaced with either input channel. This means that in addition to using it with the Superimpose effect (to get luma key functionality), you can use it with the Fade control as well. By setting the Fade control out channel to White, you can fade between the two input videos, and use the wipes at the same time! Of course, you can still fade/key to white by using the background color.

Alright, let's get moddin'! Cracking open the mixer reveals the circuit boards. Our interest is in the mixer board, which is in the center in the picture.

mixer board in the center

 The DVM-1000 boards are riddled with MX10 markings

Our two targets are IC 6 and connector 4:

IC6 and connector 4

The original instructions tell us to "cut the grey wire that runs to connector 4 - pin 7". Here's a closeup of the connector:

The grey wire is connected to the center pin of a SPDT switch. The other pins connect to pins 4 and 7 of IC 6:

IC 6, with new wires

I added a piece of electrical tape under the connections

And there you go. Now when you select "white" as your background (in the "Colour select" section of the superimpose effect, not the back color selector), you should get the video channel instead. I might put up a video demo later, but I think you get the idea.
I've rehosted the original instructions (originally hosted at http://x.sysx.org/vsv/MX10mod.html, which is now dead, and modified by LEVEL6 of leper.org, which also seems dead at the time of writing), as well as a series of pictures by vjforums member Kyle.