Laser growing up

[TheHermit]

Wow -- awesome stuff!!

Good stuff! Keep the noodles coming!!

Thanks to both of you for filling in my technical knowledge holes to enable this to happen. 🙏🙏🙏
BR
Roj

[Greg]

Good work Roj! Lots of exciting stuff happening at the end. Markg, is there a part in this that is specifically what you were referring to as hole flow?

[TheHermit]

Good work Roj! Lots of exciting stuff happening at the end. Markg, is there a part in this that is specifically what you were referring to as hole flow?

Thanks, Greg.
😎

[Markg]

Good work Roj! Lots of exciting stuff happening at the end. Markg, is there a part in this that is specifically what you were referring to as hole flow?

At about 1:09 the black starts to look like the effect and throughout there are snippets of it. At about 1:14 imagine the red was black and that's more what it was like.

[swamidog]

i've been thinking about the chopping idea for a bit, and i think an interesting solution might be to just have an invert switch that kills output based on audio / waveform band instead of adding color.

Using the beam torquer makes a significant difference and admittedly is more dynamic than the 2nd CM that I used. It can manually simulate Chris' audiomod, as well.
The LII controller that Dave Cooper & I used in London had 2 colormod generators and my demo reproduces the 'hole flow', as he taught me for Bolero.
Beam chopping could also be an alternative to create more prominent holes, which I neglected to demonstrate. I could have phase shifted RGB to be in phase for intensity mod, then change the sine to square pulse, with variable PWR to increase the holes from 0-100% of the spiral.
While shooting the video, I was more focused upon color balance and demonstrating variations of hole flow than just creating black holes. 'my bad.
Throughout the video, I'm also demonstrating various subtle changes of CM waveforms, such as sine > sawtooth > triangle > reverse sawtooth > PWR, etc.
Should have provided a voiceover narration of what's going on.
Valid point about modern projectors not having beam torquers. I could assign a rotary encoder to provide that functionality, but have the following in mind:
Except for Greg's build, I don't see joysticks nowadays, neither. A multifunction 2D touchscreen GUI is on my todo list to cover that missing element for manually controlling master size/symmetry, X/Y positioning, intensity, & HSV; some in unison.
It's still very much a work in progress.
BTW, pleased to meet you, Mark. Both of us left Laserium in 1980. Great to be back in the game, eh?
BR
Roj

[swamidog]

i often use an app (filmicpro or blackmagic) that gives me control over shutter speed and iso. this helps reduce banding. i also tend to stick a ND filter over the camera to reduce intensity and give the poor camera a fighting chance. i'm using a fairly old iphone 13.

Thanks to both of you for filling in my technical knowledge holes to enable this to happen. 🙏🙏🙏
Perhaps it would be more helpful for me to do another take, with a step by step voiceover explaining in more detail what's going on that isn't very obvious? I'm happy to grant that request, if anyone here desires.

@ Swamidog: I'm always impressed with the quality of your videos, with perfect color balance, fine lines, perfect shapes w/o inertial overshooting of sharp corners, crisp blanking cutoffs w/o color change, and no noticeable banding. Perhaps you are the master of disguising them. Your videos always leave me wondering, "How TF is he doing that?" 🤔
As Buffo says, I've never found that sweet spot for such great video quality.
My videos were recorded with a cheap Samsung phonecam, so the green looks more like an army green, regardless of what filter settings are being used.
I have purchased a RPi Global Shutter camera, specifically to get rid of video banding and have spent days (weeks TBH) messing with the dozens of parameters, to balance colors, exposures, ... After getting the static image quality acceptable, my 1st test video only updated the image every few seconds, despite the framerate being set @ 30 fps. Setting it to 60 fps only doubled the banding. 🤦
This is seriously delaying the launch of my T4 LS reveal thread.
I'm sure that these video issues are covered elsewhere on PLF, so that's today's agenda.
EDIT: Only found 3 threads asking for video recording help, with no answers, plus swamidog mentioning that his phonecam has a tissy-fit sometimes, as does mine. Round 5 with the RPi Global Shutter, I reckon. 😒
BR
Roj

[buffo]

"Hole Flow" is a great term for describing some of the very cool effects you can get with color chopping, and it's one of my favorite abstract effects; I can watch these patterns for HOURS.

The Z5 console has 3 color oscillators, each with their own chopping circuit, so I've been playing around with a basic spiral pattern while adjusting the frequency, amplitude, and waveform of each chopping circuit while having the output of all 3 color oscillators set to output on just the red channel. This allows me to set up very complex, overlapping patterns of bright red, medium and dark red, and complete blackness, that slowly move and blend around the spiral, just by tweaking the 3 separate chopping circuits and fading / mixing between the three color oscillators.

Of course, this would be rather boring in monochrome red, but I also have the AudioLaze hooked up to the output of the Z5, and I have it set to be keyed off the incoming red channel. By letting the AudioLaze handle the final color output (and also ensuring that it's beat-synchronized), I can focus my attention solely on what the different chopping circuits are doing while still getting full color output at the projector. And as a bonus, all of that added color will be beat-synchronized.

At first, it was tricky to get the different chopping frequencies to overlap enough to get good color mixing on the output of the Audiolaze, but adjusting each oscillator separately (at least until you know how many primary "spokes" of black you're getting) seemed to help a lot. And once I've got some decent overlap going and the images start to look decent, I can spend hours just goofing around with different combinations, waveforms, duty cycles, and speed variations. I can also enable chopping on the Audiolaze, which gets really weird...

I've seen all sorts of trippy effects with this setup, from spiraling patterns of black squares (zooming in or out, depending on frequency), to more regimented sections of black and color regions that look almost kaleidoscope-like, to curved black "propellers" that spin and fade, and even some shapeless blobs of black that move in weird, unpredictable ways. And I'm sure I've only scratched the surface of what is possible.

Unfortunately, it's *really* hard to capture this stuff on video. I've tried a couple different camera apps on my phone, but so far no luck. I also tried using a dedicated USB camera with a nice lens, but that didn't work either. David Zurcher has an app on his phone that seems to work great, but unfortunately the app only runs on the I-Phone; they haven't released an android version yet. But I can tell you that when you see it live and in person, it's really cool.

Adam

[dazebtwn]

Hmmm, my Z5-C only has one chop circuit shared by all 3 color oscillators. A separate chop circuit for each oscillator was a feature DZ and I discussed many years ago...do you have a modded Z5-C?

"Hole Flow" is a great term for describing some of the very cool effects you can get with color chopping, and it's one of my favorite abstract effects; I can watch these patterns for HOURS.

The Z5 console has 3 color oscillators, each with their own chopping circuit, so I've been playing around with a basic spiral pattern while adjusting the frequency, amplitude, and waveform of each chopping circuit while having the output of all 3 color oscillators set to output on just the red channel. This allows me to set up very complex, overlapping patterns of bright red, medium and dark red, and complete blackness, that slowly move and blend around the spiral, just by tweaking the 3 separate chopping circuits and fading / mixing between the three color oscillators.

Adam

[buffo]

Hmmm, my Z5-C only has one chop circuit shared by all 3 color oscillators. A separate chop circuit for each oscillator was a feature DZ and I discussed many years ago...do you have a modded Z5-C?

Yes. My Z5 is actually a Z5C+. There are only two of them on the planet right now: mine, and David's!

After seeing what David could do with his heavily-modified Z5 console, I asked him what it would cost to upgrade my unit to gain all those new features. His answer was "a lot". He would have to replace the entire front panel, add a bunch of new components, including a new circuit board under the hood, and then there was the question of whether a few key components could even be purchased anymore. (Well, crap...)

But we kept talking about it, and I kept thinking about how cool it would be, so finally, around February of this year (once David found a source for the special Z rotation pot) I decided to go for broke. David spent a couple months doing all of the upgrades and testing everything, and now I have the only other Z5 that has all the features that David has on his personal unit. It's also special in another way, in that my Z5 console originally belonged to Ed Keefe, who helped with some of the Z5 design before he passed away, so I find it comforting that his console lives on (and stays apace) with all of the new upgrades from David.

One of the coolest additions to the console was the ability to slave the main chopping circuit (on the bottom right of the color section) to one of the LFOs. This allows you to completely eliminate the retrace line on all sorts of patterns, especially these spiral patterns I've been talking about. Basically, you start with a circle, and then you use a triangle wave with an adjusted offset on one of the LFOs to give you a ramp, and you use that to change the size of the circle (so amplitude modulation of VCQO 1). By synchronizing the main chopping circuit to the same LFO, you can kill the retrace line during the sharp return of the ramp wave. Nice!

The new Z5C color oscillators each have their own chopping circuit now, and those are in addition to, and completely separate from, the main chopping circuit. But, you can also configure each color oscillator so that they won't output any color when the main chop circuit is already blanking the output. This means the retrace line is banished forever! Once you get the main chopping circuit sync'd to the LFO, you still have 3 completely separate color channels (with their own independent chopping) that you can play with to create all sorts of weird stuff, all with no retrace lines.

Admittedly, I'm probably the worst person to ask about these mods, as my understanding of the guts of the Z5 is rudimentary at best. David can explain this stuff far better than I can. But the takeaway is that I'm absolutely thrilled with what I can do with the console now.

And yes, I'm already considering buying the software to enable the audio sample delay effect that David recently demo'd. (Fortunately, I already have a Wave-USB.)

Adam

[dazebtwn]

Yes. My Z5 is actually a Z5C+. There are only two of them on the planet right now: mine, and David's!

After seeing what David could do with his heavily-modified Z5 console, I asked him what it would cost to upgrade my unit to gain all those new features. His answer was "a lot". He would have to replace the entire front panel, add a bunch of new components, including a new circuit board under the hood, and then there was the question of whether a few key components could even be purchased anymore. (Well, crap...)

But we kept talking about it, and I kept thinking about how cool it would be, so finally, around February of this year (once David found a source for the special Z rotation pot) I decided to go for broke. David spent a couple months doing all of the upgrades and testing everything, and now I have the only other Z5 that has all the features that David has on his personal unit. It's also special in another way, in that my Z5 console originally belonged to Ed Keefe, who helped with some of the Z5 design before he passed away, so I find it comforting that his console lives on (and stays apace) with all of the new upgrades from David.

One of the coolest additions to the console was the ability to slave the main chopping circuit (on the bottom right of the color section) to one of the LFOs. This allows you to completely eliminate the retrace line on all sorts of patterns, especially these spiral patterns I've been talking about. Basically, you start with a circle, and then you use a triangle wave with an adjusted offset on one of the LFOs to give you a ramp, and you use that to change the size of the circle (so amplitude modulation of VCQO 1). By synchronizing the main chopping circuit to the same LFO, you can kill the retrace line during the sharp return of the ramp wave. Nice!

The new Z5C color oscillators each have their own chopping circuit now, and those are in addition to, and completely separate from, the main chopping circuit. But, you can also configure each color oscillator so that they won't output any color when the main chop circuit is already blanking the output. This means the retrace line is banished forever! Once you get the main chopping circuit sync'd to the LFO, you still have 3 completely separate color channels (with their own independent chopping) that you can play with to create all sorts of weird stuff, all with no retrace lines.

Admittedly, I'm probably the worst person to ask about these mods, as my understanding of the guts of the Z5 is rudimentary at best. David can explain this stuff far better than I can. But the takeaway is that I'm absolutely thrilled with what I can do with the console now.

And yes, I'm already considering buying the software to enable the audio sample delay effect that David recently demo'd. (Fortunately, I already have a Wave-USB.)

Adam

Thanks Adam for your in depth response, so happy to hear that you have Ed Keefe's console!

Well there might be two and a half Z5's with all DZ's mods as I did a major upgrade a couple years ago installing most of his updates at that time...not sure I want to know what has been added since. I have always wanted 3 chop osc's and syncing the LFO's to the chop was another desired feature we discussed years ago...I guess not attending SELEM's has put me "outside the circle".

The C+ must be at least a 3U panel? Unfortunately, I built a custom case for my console which only allows for a 2U color panel...but there are always possibilities.

David, we need to talk...