- -( nimk // research :: development \\ dyne )- -

Free J - realtime vision mixer

FreeJ is a vision mixer: an instrument for realtime video manipulation used in the fields of dance teather, live veejay performance, medical visualisation and television broadcast.

FreeJ lets you interact with multiple layers of video, filtered by effect chains and then mixed together. Controllers can be scripted for keyboard, midi and joysticks, to manipulate images, movies, live cameras, particle generators, text scrollers, flash animations and more. All the resulting video mix can be shown on multiple and remote screens, encoded into a movie and streamed live to the internet.

Features

This project is running since 22 May 2001, latest release 0.9.1 on 26 November 2007. Redistributed by Debian, Gentoo and other GNU/Linux distributions.

live compositing of multiple webcams, TV signals, movie files, images, TXT files, particle generators and more..
can be remotely controlled (VJoE)
can be scripted in procedural object oriented language
can playback flash vectorial animations
no frame drop when looping movie clips
Emacs/Vi style console with hotkeys (S-Lang)
can accept asynchronous controllers at the same time (Midi, joystick and more coming..)
very efficient video engine with multithreaded layers
modular C/C++ code and flexible API
Mix multiple video layers

Progress

In 2004 the artist in residence program at Montevideo hosted the development of FreeJ's scriptable engine in Javascript. In the following years this functionality has become a core component. The flexibility of its scriptable video engine brought FreeJ to be employed in various realtime applications.

Development is currently proceeding to stabilise and document the scripting API, implement a more efficient movie player, make the software portable and add more controllers.

Gatherings are temporarily held in Amsterdam for developers to meet, merge development branches, set new aims and discuss the future of this software.

Community

The community of users and developers includes several people all around the world,, here are the statistics on partecipation.

Developers

FreeJ has been created by Denis Roio in 2001 as a dance theatre video performing tool, employed the first time in Metamorfosi. Since then it has been actively developed with contributions by Silvano Galliani, Christoph Rudorff, Fukuchi Kentaro, Andreas Schiffler and many others.

2000 - 2008 NIMK and respective authors. Verbatim copying and distribution is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved. Send inquiries & questions to Artlab @ NIMK.

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