Advanced Visualization Studio
|
|
nl:Advanced Visualization Studio
Advanced_Visualization_Studio_screenshot.jpg
Advanced Visualization Studio (AVS), is a music visualization plug-in for Winamp designed by Justin Frankel, the creator of Winamp itself. Its highly customizable design allows users to create their own visualization effects, or presets, which are featured on numerous websites, such as Winamp.com (http://www.winamp.com), deviantART, and Deskmod (http://www.deskmod.com). Several artgroups of preset authors exist as well: AVSociety (Defunct), Finnish-Flash (irc://irc.quakenet.org/finnish-flash) and VISBOT (http://www.visbot.net). Some members of the AVS community sees AVS as a new artform, a method of free expression through means not normally associated with art.
Much to the suprise of the community, AVS was recently made Open Source. The announcement was made to the community on a forum post (http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?s=3cf35de0411a1883b67640b7babcd153&threadid=216394). A Source Forge project is soon to be initialized.
| Contents |
Making presets
Every preset is made up of different components. There are three categories of components: Render, Trans and Misc. Render draws shapes, Trans transforms the current image and Misc contains the components that don't fit in other two categories. The components are plugged into a list, which is executed from top to bottom, each component doing something with the image and sending the result to the next one. A lot of components are configurable and a few are even codable. Effect lists can be included, which act as presets within presets.
The codable components allow the most customizability, when a preset author can control and program effects through AVS' simple scripting language. The codable Renders are the Superscope, which draws lines or dots, and the Texer II, which draws bitmaps. The codable Trans are Movement, Dynamic Movement, Dynamic Distance Modifier, Dynamic Shift and Bump. The only codable Misc component is the Effect List.
AVS is now at version 2.81b. Because new features are often created by request from preset authors, people are always eager to use new features. It is thus recommended to get the latest version of AVS, which comes with Winamp.
Third-party components
AVS comes with a set of built-in components, but third party components can be added and are called APEs (AVS Plug-in Effects). The most used APEs are Channel Shift, Color Map, Color Reduction and Texer by Steven Wittens and the Convolution Filter by Tom Holden. Some of these APEs are included in the standard AVS install. Others are included in the preset collections, or packs, that need them.
The history of AVS
The first versions were without the superscope and the dynamic movement. These are the most powerful componenets. The presets were in a very different style than the presets today. This older style is known as old-skool AVS. The authors that were the most prominent in this style were paranoya, tonic and catmandu. At this time, some of the best authors worked together in the artgroup AVSociety. Unfortunately, all these authors have stopped making AVS around 2002, but you can probably still find their presets on the internet. AVSociety died with them.
The introduction of the superscope and the dynamic movement changed AVS entirely. You could now write your own code and the visualizations were only limited by your imagination and the power of your computer. This new style became known as new-skool AVS. In 2001, El-Vis wrote the first 3d rotation code for the superscope. Somewhat later UnConeD wrote the first 3d raytracing code the dynamic movement. Both these authors got well known and their packs were downloaded a lot.
After the death of AVSociety, two other artgroups were formed: Finnish-Flash by the Finnish preset authors Tuggummi, Degnic, Oussy and zxe and VISBOT, originally started by Yathosho, Duo, NemoOrange and skupers. These groups also attracted new talent, like Zamuz and Shock-Value.
Not everything was well in the AVS community though. Because AVS wasn't updated in a few years, people started running out of possibilities. New features added by APEs from UnConeD (Steven Wittens) and Tom Holden solved this problem only partially.
A new revolution in AVS happened in the fall of 2003. A totally new version, after a lot of complaining by the preset authors, was released by Nullsoft. This new version was faster and added several new features like arrays and interactivity. This was version 2.81b, the latest version at the time of writing (spring 2004).
Recently AVS got more recognition. El-Vis did visuals in AVS for a German theatre production, VISBOT performed on the 320x240 visual art festival and fšk did visuals in AVS in clubs. VISBOT also appeared in the Coded Cultures (http://utonium.5uper.net/codedcultures/) exhibition in the Museumsquartier in Vienna.
AVS was made officially Open Source on May 18, 2005. The source is available at Nullsoft's Website (http://www.nullsoft.com/free/avs/)
External links
- NDSN: Advanced Visualization Studio (http://www.winamp.com/nsdn/winamp/plugins/avs/)
- AVS Packs on Winamp.com (http://www.winamp.com/plugins/browse.php?ctype=P&category=11)
- AVS Source code (http://www.nullsoft.com/free/avs/)
- VISBOT (http://www.visbot.net/)
- AVSociety (http://avsociety.deviantart.com/)
- Finnish-Flash (http://finnishflash.deviantart.com/)
- Steven Wittens' APEs (http://www.acko.net/art/avs)