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Flow motion/apocypse now hybrid?
  • This may be like asking McDonald's and Wendy's to share recipes, but is this at all a possibility? I only ask because I've seen other patches mixed together but that may have been because they had the right compatibility. There is nothing wrong with either patch as is, I was just curious on what a merger would look like.

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  • @GravitateMediaGroup @subco

    I am certainly not going to tell anyone to shush about suggesting the idea, but I will answer the question about mixing viability and the reasoning for doing/not doing certain things. :)

    While there are many settings authors on the site (mpgxsvcd, Ralph_B, mozes, balazer, bkmwcd, driftwood, Lpowell, cbrandin, just to name a few) not all of them have the same goals or approach. My father used to say that entrepeneurs make poor employees, and what that means is that some people do their best work when it is "their baby" and are not as all as effective when placed in a framework setup by somebody else.

    I mention this not as a critique of the settings authors (who are doing a great job) but as a look at why they may be doing a better job now then they would together.

    That said, it is of course a generalized statement so let us get specific. Some settings (Sanity 5 and Flowmotion 2.02 for example) are designed as self-contained systems. That is to say, they are (in the words of their authors) so balanced in different areas, so interconnected in their other settings and matrices, that it would be very difficult to swap anything out from another author and maintain similar reliability and performance.

    On the other hand, driftwood, bkmwcd and cbrandin have more similarities to each author in approach, allowing them to contribute things to each other. One of the reasons for this is because of a different goal. Flowmotion 2.02 was designed as an all-around setting that would be, in essence, the one setting tied to the author at a given time, balanced so that it could be the only setting a given user would load: a single branch of development tested extensively and rarely updated, by the very design. By contrast, at any given time bkmwcd and driftwood have several settings being developed, all with a different emphasis and goal. Swapping in a new component can result in a new branch of development in that framework because users are expected to choose their preferred emphasis as opposed to getting a single suggestion as to "the best one".

    Driftwood (up until recently) had devoted the overwhelming majority of his time to high bitrate intra (GOP1) 24H settings, with all other shooting modes being secondary. GOP1 settings did not meet the criteria of most other settings authors. With the recent Cluster releases that has changed (which is not to say that significant modifications to modes such as SH were not made during that time, as even a casual glance through the Quantum betas reveals). Flowmotion has consistently treated all modes equally.

    So that is why, as a user, my perception is that given the different approaches, many of the authothers benefit the community more working in their diverse approaches as opposed to in a single group effort.

  • I guess that makes sense. Although there have been a lot of group efforts turn out very successful, Microsoft and Apple being 2 that come to mind ; )

  • @GravitateMediaGroup I think one of the most succesful purely group efforts (between for-profit companies) would be the MIDI standard. I wish they could have gotten together and done a MIDI 2.0 in the same way later on. :)

  • That's a good summary. You know, if the bitrate ceiling of the Gh2 was only a bit higher..

  • @Sage I wonder if UHS-I support will make a difference on the GH3 if it gets hacked, as far as that goes. Then maybe it could support some of "limited recording time" modes you were able to devise for SH for sustained lengths.

    Of course, it remains to be seen what the released GH3 brings to the table in terms of image quality and whether it ends up with the sort of community support the GH2 did. I really hope moire and aliasing are as good as the GH2 or better - it would be a very unfortunate trade-off for them to get worse.

  • @thepalalias No, no, no, you got it completely wrong!

    MIDI was Dave Smith's brainchild, the only "group effort" was in trying to pin down exactly what he was on about. The problem was that MIDI was invented in the paleolithic era, i.e. before the invention of ".0" version numbers. As a result, it took years for the hapless MIDI Manufacturers Association to track down all of Dave's lab notes (no email yet either) and compile them into the official "MIDI Specification". By that time, SCI had come up with a bunch more SysEx codes and the zero-vs-one-based MIDI channel numbering curse had already reared its flaming head. I recall fondly the prototype Prophet 600, for which I was assigned to program a Commodore 64 Multi-Track Sequencer. Whenever the P600 refused to acknowledge a SysEx request, I was referred to Dave himself for technical support...

    Also, good work on your write-up of GH2 patch development. Your insight on how Flow Motion v2 was designed was right on target. One of the reasons FM2 is not easily modified is because I was determined to make all frame rates work reliably at 100Mbps. Once I got the most critical modes working, I had to take care not to inadvertently disrupt any of the settings with optimizations intended for subordinate modes. That required more and more regression testing the closer I got to releasing it. Regrettably, it took a couple of revisions to get everything to work optimally at the same time.

  • @LPowell What I said about MIDI was not in contradiction to what you said (though it does of course get into the complications of it :) What I meant is that the companies recognized that implementing at least some of the functionality in all of their products was more useful to them than trying to develop each of them developing their own. Compare this to audio plug-ins (MAS, RTAS, AAX, VST 1 2 3, Audio Units (specific to different OS X versions), DirectX, DMO, Logic proprietary, Buzz proprietary, etc.)

    I guess I should have been specific in what sort of "group effort" I meant. In this case I was only talking about "implementing the standard" or "building upon someone else's work", not in terms of everyone collaborating in creating the underlying structure. You brought up an important point though, demonstrating that even in that framework individual independent work was the driving force in the creation.

    I truly admire the audio tech. guys that built so many groundbreaking technologies. Whether it be the synth gurus like Dave Smith and Bob Moog, or the sampling geniuses like Mitch Marcoullier at Synclavier, there were so many utterly essential things done before the computer even became center of music creation and playback that it is today. I think one of the most unrecognized figures is Ernest Cholakis (who I often have the pleasure of working with) who was very ahead of his time in impulse response work (and continues to be ahead of the game today).

    As far as FM v2, it has been really useful to a lot of people so I think the revision process yielded good results, whatever the timeline.

  • I remember Dave Smith - genius. Doesn't music bring us altogether?! Bit off topic but I was in a band (early simmons kit drummer - good 'ol Dave Simmons!) who had a genius using a bbc B computer to record the electronics of a bastardised Roland GR500 system connecting into Roland's 24 pin CV/Gate interface - recording signals generated by a guitar pick-up system. Always playing up but pre-midi and mindblowing until the soldering iron had to come out again.

  • I think UHS-I and the new cpu should probably make for a bitrate heaven. I hope the GH3 proves a winner (the resolving power question keeps one up at night)

    Lpowell, an 'extreme' variation of your patch would really be ideal. Your 3gop, with a more intense bitrate, would be the forefront of quality. The bottom 2 stops need the love.

  • @thepalalias Totally agree, MIDI was fortunate in being adopted industry-wide in an era before everyone's lawyers started pre-emptively locking down anything that smelled like intellectual property. One of the ridiculous and self-defeating things about the Micro Four Thirds standard is how licensees are required to sign non-disclosure agreements that prohibit them from documenting how even the most basic electronic interfaces work. As a result, earnest third-party supporters like Birger are blocked from developing products that could greatly expand the scope and capabilities of the system. Let's hope BMC's MFT mount is successful in spite of such short-sighted policies.

  • Incidentally, I've got an only midi project open at the moment

  • @Sage I hope so too.

    @driftwood @Lpowell @Sage Ah, the power of music. :)

    Speaking of "The Power of Music"... (NSFW) http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/233972

    And just in case you're wondering, though I had nothing to do with the above number, I once sang it to one of my professors in college to familiarize them with the material, solo a cappella, with an audience of the professor and one other student.

  • @thepapalias Was the end of MIDI cause by wave-samples? didn't remember when and how I took of the MIDi interface cable from my 486 computer :))

  • @tinbeo More often it was MIDI data being transferred over other protocols (e.g. USB, etc.) in the case of so many keyboards, etc. But I still use MIDI today - I just it integrated into my audio interface as opposed to as a dedicated device. :)

    But of course it varies from person to person. A lot of people still use MIDI as a triggering system - it is still more widely supported than various OSC options, for instance - even when working with samples.