testing the setup with goPro
As I had still hoped by this point, the test worked out pretty smoothly.
I always had this idea before that doing stuff with video was really complicated to get to work properly. I guess that maybe part of this is down to getting stuff to work well without any glitches or degradation of the signal.
However, seeing as that’s what I was going for here, everything is great, and works just easily..
There was some initial setback to this, as I suddenly realised that my goPro case didn’t have any holes in the side to accommodate the two cables needed (hdmi out for the video signal, and USB in for power). So a quick bit of drilling (turns out it’s quite hard to drill a neat rectangle shape) and I had the goPro ready to be powered up and plugged in.
Looks kinda shitty, but no one will notice…
So, once I’d hooked the goPro up to an hdmi-av converter I bought, then plugged this into the left channel of the dirty mixer, I got this result:
There are some pretty sweet diagonal glitch lines that pop up as you transition between the two. There’s also this really crazy point somewhere around halfway or just after, where the visuals go completely berserk and rapidly scramble around all over the place.
It just so perfectly fits. We have the outer and inner world contained within this little metal case, a perspective shifter, and they’re both fighting for our attention. Which one will win?
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Another point to note with this setup is that the hdmi-av converter also has the option to convert between the PAL and NTSC video formats (much like the VGA converters do). I noticed that, when matching this setting on both the VGA converters and the hdmi-av converter, that the video blending between the two channels can be much smoother, almost with no glitching at all. This is, of course, not always stable (as I’ve found out with these video experiments).
There is always a sweet spot, but even that can be tenuous at times. It’s the beauty of feedback, and perhaps also the fact that I have about 4 different signal converters, all with their own inherent noise and imperfections, which I suppose when added together, may create some unpredictable behaviour.
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And, so that’s it, really. I’ve finally finished the visual setup, all ready for the installation. Now, there’s just some more time for me to experiment and play around with the setup even more, and see what I can come up with, especially when combined with the LP.
Until then.
