Musicians have long benefited from audio plug-ins; why not visualists and VJs? The FreeFrame plug-in format is the answer to that question, with broad support in favored visual apps like Resolue Avenue, Modul8, vvvv, Jitter, and others. All you need is some plug-in juice to feed them.
Enter Marc Wren, whose new sfFreeFrame plug-in is a fully free and open source set of visual plugins compatible with FreeFrame 1.5 hosts. Because it’s free software, you’re also free to check out and modify, under the same license, the source – a great way to learn about 3D OpenGL programming and FF.
I’ve selected a couple of my favorites, but there are others in the collection, too. I like that, far from the usual (and often unsatisfying) video filters, you get some really lovely, audio-reactive abstract visuals. I hope this sparks other similar efforts.
Marc writes with further explanation:
Howdy, I’ve been enjoying your blog for a while and wanted to share something I thought your readers might be interested in. I just released the first version of a project I’ve been working on called sfFreeFrame. It’s a collection of FreeFrame plugins for use in A/V software like Resolume. The project is open source for anyone interested in tinkering with the code. I’m hoping these plugins will be useful both to people looking for additional elements to use in their performances and for people trying to get into visual programing. I wanted to get the project out for the New Year as a way of giving back to the development community. There are four plugins at the moment and I plan to add more throughout the year (I’ve been working on these during my lunch hours so it’s a been a little slow going). The project is in Beta so I’m hoping you can help me get people to play with it and report bugs. You can find demos of what the plugins look like at:
http://sffreeframe.sourceforge.net/For anyone interested in playing
with the code, the project is hosted at SourceForge:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/sffreeframe/
Thanks, Marc! Anyone else got favorite FF plugins or collections, especially for the newer 1.5 format? And anyone else doing similar development?
(One idea: any readers interested in starting a little FF study group? Now that the format works with OpenFrameworks…)