Quick start

2. Download videobrain_v1.0.zip. Unarchive the folder and move its contents to some place easy to get to. Launch Live and drag BRAINCTRL.amxd onto a new MIDI track.

   

3. Launch the Video Brain app. When it opens it presents a dialog asking for the location of the clips folder. Point it to the Clips folder you just downloaded and click Open.

   

4. Back in Live, select the BRAINCTRL.amxd track and set it to send MIDI Out to the IAC Driver on Channel 16. Make sure MIDI ports Track and Sync are turned On for the IAC Driver Output in Live's MIDI Sync Preferences. Hit play in Live and twist some of BRAINCTRL's knobs. Video Brain should come to life.

   

What the?

• Video Brain is an macOS app for mixing video clips. It’s essentially a Quartz Composer composition wrapped in a Mac app that’s controlled in Ableton Live via a Max for Live device called BRAINCTRL.

  

• The BRAINCTRL Max for Live device sends MIDI messages to the Video Brain app. Those messages control the parameters that determine Video Brain’s output. The video output from the Video Brain app is routed back to BRAINCTRL via Syphon. This setup enables video monitoring from within Live.

  

• Video Brain creates its video output by combining a 4-channel video mixer with an effects and compositing chain. Nearly all of Video Brain’s parameters are either determined or modulated by MIDI clock and CC messages. For example, all clips are automatically time-stretched and looped to the tempo of the MIDI clock.

  

Clip mixing

Once Video Brain launches, it scans the clips folder you specified and groups the videos into sets of 8. Selecting between these sets is controlled by the A and B knobs. The Auto knob changes the behavior of the clip mixer.

Knobs A and B select the clip group for each mixing channel. When set to 0, the clip mixer for that channel is turned off. When set to 1, no group is selected and all clips are available for auto-mixing.

The Auto knob selects between mixing behaviors and color palettes for each channel. See the table below for details.

FX options

Each of the 4 video clips are sent through their own effects chain. Clips 1 and 2 are then blended to make channel A and clips 3 and 4 are blended to make channel B. Channel A is then blended with channel B. Two more effects are applied to make the final video. The specific effects and blending operations used at each stage are determined by the presets selected by the FX knob.

The FX knob selects between 8 presets that determine the FX types and blending operations used during each stage of the image processing pipeline.

Examples

Here are a few examples of Video Brain in action. The color palettes and source clips were put together specifically for the band NOJESUS. Depending on the source clips you provide, the look and feel of Video Brain's output could be completely different from these examples.

Source files

Video Brain is a collection of Quartz Composer patches wrapped in a macOS application. It’s operated via MIDI sent by BRAINCTRL, a Max for Live device. Feel free to poke around the source files to see how it all works. Be sure to follow the instructions in the README file if you want to tweak something and rebuild the app or Max for Live device.

Why?

Video Brain was made by Justin Rhoades in 2012 for the band NOJESUS. The initial version was a Quartz Composer composition that used MIDI input to trigger time-stretched video clips of early 90s Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. Over the next three years Video Brain evolved into a standalone app with a companion Max for Live patch called BRAINCTRL. This combo enables tempo-synced video mixing and generative art creation from within the context of Ableton Live.