[fluxus] Screen Recording?

[Dave Griffiths]

> Hi all,
>
> I'm just starting out with fluxus and I'm due to be doing a live
> performance
> next week, so two questions regarding that:
>
> First, does anybody have any general tips for performing live? (like
> "print
> out the function list and keep it handy" etc.)

livecoding is only one way to do it, you can make the whole thing remote
control via osc, and hide the code (making for a non toplap manefesto
conformant performance of course)

or just control a fluxus script from something like pd

but if you're livecoding it depends how much you feel comfortable doing. I
usually use a few prewritten scripts and tweak them live, and do at least
one script "from scratch" which is always along the lines of a recursive
branching structure as they are the fastest to write. I've written some
wrappers that make it easier to livecode the physics that I'll release
too.

> Second, we are looking to record either the whole performance (couple
> hours)
> or short clips onto a usb harddrive. I know fluxus' frame dump is too slow
> to do this, so is there any better way to record what's going on? I
> noticed
> there is a nice quality realtime dump of fluxus at
> http://www.archive.org/details/livekode - how was that done? I'm running
> under linux.

the way I had to do that movie was using an undocumented feature of fluxus
which records your keypresses along with timestamps so they can be
replayed later, not necessarily in realtime. This means you can regenerate
and save the frames at a locked framerate and high resoulution.

it's undocumented because the interface to it is rubbish...

there are two commands (load-code "filename") and (save-code "filename")
which load/save the results of the keypress recorder to disk. f6 is the
recorder key, which cycles between playback or record, and f7 turns it off
(it's akward because I've run out of f-keys).

so it's possible to record a livecoding performance - I've never tried
recording a live gig yet though.

> I'm also having a problem with going fullscreen - for some reason ctrl+f
> just maximises the window, so I'm still left with the gnome panels and
> fluxus titlebar. How do I get rid of all that and have fluxus in "true"
> fullscreen?

the only way I manage to get round that one was to run fluxbox

> I'm toying with an object oriented fork of fluxus using the Ruby scripting
> language at the moment, I'll post again when I have some code that
> actually
> runs (my C++ isn't too hot!) - if anyone is interested, drop me a line!
> Fluxus is a really great bit of software and I've really taken to it -
> it's
> just the scheme interface (and all that functional programming malarkey)
> is
> providing a bit of a barrier for me!

I'd really recommend taking the time to learn Scheme, as it makes you a
better programmer to learn different languages, especially one that is so
different to the C based ones we mostly use these days. Mainly though, its
really suitable to the way fluxus works. My longterm goal is to reduce the
number of function calls by making it more state based, but we could make
it more namespaced too.

In cvs there is an experimental python binding, but I haven't tried
building it for ages, only a few commands are bound, and it's functional,
rather than object based.

cheers,

dave