Live Mac visual app VDMX6 is now shipping some of the new hotness the developers promised with the transition to Metal for rendering. Apple’s frameworks unlock a ton of visual tricks, from tracking video to color scopes to background removal.
I love these applications for computer vision. Instead of uploading data to a cloud that’s running through tons of water and training a surveillance state (gah!), we’re talking about machine learning that’s local, on your machine, using some nice silicon that’s already there, and opening up artistic uses.
Machine learning also provides segmentation of images, finally letting us break up images by face and body in ways we always imagined. That isn’t just for obvious tasks, either: y’all could invent new ways of getting expressive with components of an image this way. That’s why it’s exciting to put this in the hands of VJs and artists.
It’s not just that in VDMX6, either. Here’s what’s new (tutorials linked in-line and videos below):
- Video tracking of faces, hands, and bodies (see below)
- Scopes for color with waveform, vectorscope modes
- OCR for text and QR codes (we hinted at this before – imagine this could open up audience interactions and things, too)
- Color transfer FX: start with a reference image, and match color and brightness to that (oooooh)
- Remove background FX (person segmentation)
- Blur and Overlay Faces FX
- Segmented Color Transfer
- Segmented Blur FX
Those Apple frameworks work really well, and they’re already built for the chips on the Mac – even M1 can perform all of this handily.
Vidvox has new tutorials, too:
More from Vidvox:
VDMX6 Update – Video Tracking, OCR, Scopes, Color Transfer and more!