Introducing ISF for Jitter

December 13, 2019

Today we are extra excited to announce an open source collaboration with the team over at Cycling74, creators of Max. Now all of the amazing ISF shaders that come with VDMX and on interactiveshaderformat.com can be used right alongside your other Jitter code using the jit.gl.isf object, available on Mac and Windows!

You can install jit.gl.isf directly from the Max package manager panel, accessible from the File menu. If you don’t already have any ISF shaders installed, also grab the free ISF Editor app for your appropriate platform. The free editor tool comes with the same standard set of 300+ generators, effects, and transitions we bundle with VDMX to get started with.

With this release Max joins the over a dozen apps and frameworks that support ISF as a standard for GLSL shaders. With ISF, there is no need to convert or translate code when moving between software. Write your generators and effects once, then use in Max, Motion, Final Cut Pro X, VDMX, on the web, and other video platforms. The specification includes conventions for working with multi-pass shaders with persistent frame buffers, allowing for the creation of complex compositions in a single easy to share file. The ISF documentation pages include detailed walkthroughs of the specification along with useful reference notes and a quick start for learning the basics of GLSL.

ISF for Jitter can be used out of the box with over 300 generators, effects, and transitions. Install the free ISF Editor to get the standard collection of shaders.

Documentation

jit.gl.isf includes an extensive help patch, examples, and complete reference.

Easy to Install

Use the Max package manager to download the jit.gl.isf object and access the launcher patch. Available on Mac and Windows.

Online Community

Visit the ISF sharing website to find new generators and effects that can be used directly in with jit.gl.isf without any additional conversion. GLSL shaders written in other formats are often easily translatable to the ISF specification. See the ISF Documentation for useful tips and examples.

Audio Visualizers

The ISF specification helps standardize techniques for creating advanced compositions like audio visualizers. See the include example patches and ISF Documentation for more information.

Want to learn more? Read more about it on the ISF for Jitter website, watch an introduction video tutorial, and visit the Max forums for more details from the Cycling74 crew. Developers curious to take a look under the hood can find the open source codebase in the jit.gl.isf repository. For the latest in ISF news, follow the @ISFVideo account on Twitter.

And don’t forget to check out some of our other tutorials describing techniques for using Max and VDMX together, such as using the OSCQuery Helper tool for simplifying OSC sync and sharing video streams via Syphon.

Image from Meta-7 by John Sully, XIX Collective and MojoVideoTech

Mojo Video Tech gives us a behind the scenes on Meta-7, a new collaboration with XIX Collective and John Sully

May 8, 2019

We’ve been emailing with MojoVideoTech for about 15 years now, and his career goes back well before that… a full in depth interview is long overdue, but today we’ll have to settle for a quick behind the scenes of his latest project Meta-7, which is playing through May 18th, 2019, and you can still get tickets.

International Sound Artist John Sully teams up with XIX Collective and MojoVideoTech to present, META-7 (an alchemic opera). Audience members lay on a sub-bass vibrating floor surrounded by a 7.1 sound system inside a 360° video mapped dome. The story is about all of us. Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where do we go after? Very much inspired by Sully’s album listening parties when he was a kid in the 70s, META-7 is a gesture towards the sacred and mysterious through a deep immersion of sound, light and architectural design. There will be 4 shows per night at 7,8,9 and 10pm. Please join us at 10-16 Studios, 10-16 46 Ave Long Island City NY.

MojoVideoTech has also provided us with a description of how the setup works… if you plan to go, maybe wait until afterwards to read the rest of this to avoid any sensory spoilers.

Pixel Spirit Deck Table with guest Colin Evoy Sebestyen

August 30, 2017

A few weeks ago Patricio Gonzalez Vivo (creator of the infamous Book of Shaders, one of the best online resources for learning GLSL) released a new project known as the Pixel Spirit Deck, a set of tarot cards where each image includes includes code that can be used to draw the shape...

Patricio's Book of Shaders: GLSL in the Classroom

December 21, 2015

Last week I had a chance to be a special guest for the final presentations in Patricio Gonzalez Vivo's GLSL class at Parsons. One of the big take aways from the class was how versatile the language is, with students presenting projects ranging from web based mapping to 3D Unity worlds, realtime data visualizations in openFrameworks, and of course for live visual performance, all driven using GLSL.

Introducing ISF Video Generators and FX

December 24, 2013

ISF stands for "Interactive Shader Format", and is a file format that describes a GLSL fragment shader, as well as how to execute and interact with it. The goal of this file format is to provide a simple and minimal interface for image filters and generative video sources that allows them to be interacted with and reused in a generic and modular fashion. ISF is nothing more than a [slightly modified] GLSL fragment shader with a JSON blob at the beginning that describes how to interact with the shader (how many inputs/uniform variables it has, what their names are, what kind of inputs/variables they are, that sort of thing). ISF isn't some crazy new groundbreaking technology- it's just a simple and useful combination of two things that have been around for a while to make a minimal- but highly effective- filter format.