If you are unable to read CDMotion, you’re not alone. createdigitalmotion.com’s domain was not properly renewed by our previous registrar, 1&1, because of a foul-up with closing out an account with them for hosting. (Early in CDM’s history, the site – small at the time – was hosted by 1&1.) I’ve verified with 1&1 that this domain isn’t getting sold to anyone or anything like that — it’s in the ICANN’s redemption period, so I’m working on getting it back. It’s an embarrassing situation, and my apologies to readers. All the rest of CDM’s domains are happy and healthy in one place; the transfer of this one had simply been botched (by me). We’ll certainly correct the issue and keep you posted.

Question for Internet geeks out there — I am a bit disturbed that while 1&1 says it’s in redemption, they say it’ll take up to five business days to get it back, AND they appear to have parked a search page there. I thought that the domain simply shouldn’t resolve. Got any tips on expediting or what this shady business is with Sedo Parking and DomCollect? Let us know. Maybe, as with other things we’ve learned over the years publishing online, we can at least guide others. -PK

Jaymis Loveday sits down with Deborah Johnson for Create Digital Motion in a conversation about live visuals for music. Deborah (right), aka CandyStation, is touring with Sufjan Stevens, another of our favorite musicians. (If I could come up with more excuses to bring him into a "digital music" blog, I would.)

It really is a conversation, as Jaymis has plenty of thoughts himself, having toured with Australian Idol Bobby Flynn (and I think the two are kindred in aesthetic).

See Deborah’s visuals above, and check out the full interview on CDMotion:

Interview: Deborah Johnson on Sufjan, Singer Songwriters, and Content

Many artists tour with visuals, but use canned material. Seen any particularly terrific shows with live visuals lately? (Maybe someday we’ll be able to get together a matchmaking service for Create Digital Musicians and Create Digital Motionists — speaking as someone who does do both, it’s not always easy to split energies, and collaboration is more fun!)

Texas, here we come. Before the armies of bands hit Austin for South by Southwest, we’ve got some events going during SxSW Interactive — the “spring break for Web geeks” festival of online tech.

Laptopists battle it out Saturday night 3/8: The Digital Showcase at the Austin Museum of Art is holding a Laptop Battle for Texan laptop artists. I’ll be judging, along with CDM reader favorite (and reader) proem, and two other judges. The night also  features performances from New Berlin and Richard Gear, plus live visuals from CDMotion contributor Dan Winckler. Details at AMODA, upcoming.org. (A paltry $4-$7, and even 18 year-olds can get in.)

Explore creative interfaces for data Sunday 3/9: My panel with interaction design pioneer S. Joy Mountford (Apple, Yahoo) will look at how Web information can become a fluid, artistic medium for visualization and sonification. Details at Create Digital Motion. (Requires SxSW Interactive badge.)

Live CDM music and motion party Monday 3/10: Bring your musical, visual toys, custom code, and DIY projects and hang out with other CDMers at 8pm, then stick around for live performances from musicians and visualists. Details below; let us know you’re coming at upcoming.org, Facebook, SXSWHERE party guide. Free, no badge required.

More on the CDM party — good chance to chill before SxSW Music unloads on you!

CDM Live Music + Motion @ SxSW Interactive

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/447754/?ps=6

Brought to you by CDM and Livid Instruments, makers of the Ohm. (See our interview last month; very curious to see Jay use this live in the party — will try to get some video of it in action, assuming I’m not playing at the time.)

8:00 PM — Open mixer / project share: bring your custom code, custom patches, favorite music and motion toys, and DIY hardware — finished or not — and hang out with CDM readers, Austin’s digital scene, and SxSWers.

Music

proem
http://www.proemland.com/

Peter Kirn
http://createdigitalmusic.com

Lila’s Medicine
http://www.myspace.com/lilasmedicine

Motion

Live visuals from Livid Instruments and Friends:

Jay Smith – Livid Instruments
http://www.lividinstruments.com/about_history.php

Kusser – Open Labs
http://www.myspace.com/kusser

… and surprise visualist appearances

FREE
Please RSVP
No SxSW badge required
(but you can wear it as a badge of honor, if you like)

And the East German judge says…

More specs on the AMODA party Saturday:

… and scratching:

The review isn’t without the odd caveat: for one, you’ll need to pluck down a couple grand to get the complete setup because the Rane mixer employed is required, though rndm ultimately says that’s worth it for the integration payoff. And available transitions and effects are limited in range and prefer to run on dedicated GPUs (think MacBook Pro, or a PC laptop with a dedicated NVIDIA or ATI card). But as you can see, the results are incredibly slick, and there’s no question video on vinyl now has a tool to beat. Check out the complete review and technical details on our visualist sister site:

Hands-on Review: Serato’s VIDEO-SL for Visual Vinyl Turntablism

UnitedVisualArtists blow us away with more elegant digital art, including the new generative visuals seen above for Chemical Brothers.

Jaymis has good times experimenting with slow motion on his new Sony camera; now gorgeous motion from butterflies is the domain of consumers as well as big-budget nature programs.

And in other news: top-shelf hard drive RAIDs, our own Jitterist vade talks about his work, remembering Doc Bailey’s spectacular work, what’s new (or isn’t all that new) in Jitter for Max 5, I get set straight on intelligent mirrors, and virtual access to the best cutting-edge techniques from visual mecca SIGGRAPH.

We’re pleased to welcome Dan Winckler to our team on CDMo, and we look forward to kicking this site’s little sibling into high gear. Musicians: visualists are your friends!

DVJing: Pioneer Wants You to VJ with Pictures of Their Gear
DJ gear maker Pioneer is banking on the potential popularity of VJing in DJ sets. They’ve got quite a nice site up (good) and are giving away free clips of their gear rotating around (pass).

Sony HVR-V1P HDV Camera: Smooth Slow Motion Test
Jaymis has a new toy. This new toy shoots 200 frames person second. That means super-smooth slow-mo footage. Have a look, because it was enough for Jaymis to end his ban on gear from Sony.

Wearable Wrist Brace VJ Controller
This has potential for music, as well; it’s a wrist brace with embedded sensors and RFID tags, for wireless, wrist-based music control!

Motion Graphics on Trampoline
Anyone using graphics apps will appreciate this one. And anyone using Macs will appreciate the appearance of the hated colorful beach ball of doom.

To keep up with the latest on Create Digital Motion, be sure to grab the RSS feed.

Wii-controlled visuals. Wii VJ: Wii Remote vs. MacBook Pro Video/Audio Sampler. The awesomely-talented Daito Manabe, whom we already loved for his vibrating chaise lounge controlled by turntables powered by Ms. Pinky, has been doing wonderful stuff with the Wii. Here, he turns a Wii and (apparently) Jitter into an interactive mirror / video sampler.

Smooth out that shaky video. Many new features in Final Cut Studio help high-end video producers produce pro-quality material. One feature can help stabilize your badly-shot / shaky camera footage. It really is capable of performing some minor miracles on short bits of footage. Check out our first tests: Final Cut Studio 2 SmoothCam Tested: Fix Those Shaky Shots. And some reaction from the interwebs: SmoothCam in FCS2: Editblog Tests, Comparison.

Review: Real-time, Uncompressed HD Mixing On the Cheap, with Decklink Intensity

The possibilities are tantalizing. Anton uses an HD converter to mix a Mac laptop with visuals generated by a Mac desktop. With the right configuration, you might also mix two external HD streams, and/or output to HD using the card. On the PC side, this could even be portable, using a lightweight SFF PC. Now, if they’d just give us ExpressCard. If you do video as well as music, let us know what you think of the story.

(Side note: the card lives at Polytechnic University, which has what’s turning into a powerhouse program for interactive media. As it happens, it’s also been host to regular Max “patching circles” for any of you in New York. Now, we did actually leave the building last night as a small fire had broken out in the building. We didn’t start the fire, though.)

According to our Basecamp account it has been exactly 1 year since we first started working on the CDM redesign. You remember how CDM used to be don’t you? Internet Explorer users having to scroll down 2 pages before reaching the first content item? Great times! According to our stats only 41% of CDM readers are on IE. You know that it works in IE now, right? You can change back if you really want to…

Around 90% of our visitors are from the USA, followed by the UK, EU, Australia, Canada and Netherlands. Our biggest search terms include “garageband for windows”, “create digital music”, “ipod mixer”, “pro tools”, and “ableton”. This, and the CDM comments feed leads me to believe that this site’s biggest readers are savvy, bleeding edge digital tech gurus and base level newbies who have just learned to type, decided to call themselves DJ SHINY and hunt down an iDJ.

We’re more or less continually working on the site (ok, so we take a break occasionally to laugh at press releases from phone ringtone companies), but occasionally we get really excited and decide to do something big and cool. Last time that resulted in CreateDigitalMotion, which I’m rather proud of. More recently we’ve been working on some new features we hope you’ll like, but that was put together without any consultation from you, dearest reader, you might hate it. So I’d like to get a little feedback on what you’d like to see from the site. How do you use it? What would make coming here a more pleasant experience for you? Which bits of the site do you use/not use. Do you use RSS? Are you happy with Feedburner? Do you have trouble finding information outside of the blog chronology?

Actually, I’ll give you my current list of possible future tweaks and edits, then if there are any other burning desires happening we can work them out in the comments:

Search and Archives:

• Live, AJAX-y search
• Compact search results, fit more on the page
• Enable search by multiple tags
• Less cumbersome archives page(s)

Templates and Design:

• Stronger top category navigation, more tags to choose from
• CDM Mobile Template (Peter’s request, does anyone else browse the site via PDA, phone or DS?)

Comments and Community:

• WYSIWIG editor for comments
• RSS or Email subscription for particular comments threads
• We’ve talked about CreateDigitalNoise member blogs. Would anyone use something like this? Do you already have enough neglected blogs, community sites and social networking experiments without us adding to the confusion?

There are also some things which I’ve considered mothballing. I don’t use them, but I’d like to check whether others do before I destroy your favourite part of the site. I’ve been thinking about removing Gravatars as they seem to add quite a chunk of loading time to individual entry pages and not many people seem to use them. I’m also a bit down on the inter-post navigation links. These took quite a bit of WordPress hacking to implement, but I’ve never touched them. Does anyone use them at all? Did you even know that they exist? Does anyone actually use buttons or scroll bars for navigation anymore?

What about Digg/Del.icio.us buttons? I personally feel that I’m quite capable of deciding whether to bookmark a site without being prompted, but they seem quite popular. Does this mean popular with site users or is it just webmasters who like them?

If there’s anything you feel I’ve missed out I’d love to hear about it. I’ll be leaving on a 3 week jaunt to Vietnam just as Peter returns, but it would be great to have a nice neat list of to do items ready for my return.

We looked at 3dconnexion, the creators of fantastic 3D controllers from the folks who brought us the new Logitech NuLOOQ. If you’ve got Windows, these could be just the thing for your next three-dimensional music outing; Mac users, sadly, need not apply — ain’t no drivers.

Adobe Lightroom is now available in beta in both Mac and Windows versions, and Jaymis discovers even casual photographers might like. To me, it’s a bit like iPhoto Pro in the way Photoshop Elements hadn’t been.

If you’ve already added Commodore 64 sounds to your PC as a PCI card, why not use the other slot to install genuine retro vector graphics, a la Asteroids? I want to see someone VJ with vector; put together that ghetto-fabulous PC minitower and go to town.

The SIGGRAPH show last week in Boston was host to generative art in which, finally, computers really can dream of electric sheep; if that doesn’t strike your fancy, try using Firefox code to create eye candy instead.

But what really stole the show for me was the new MUSE music video, shown below. Try to top this with your own music video, even with a unicorn. It simply can’t be done. What can us indie musicians do to match high-end special effects in mainstream music video releases? Uh, learn After Effects and Maya? Not sure.

After our “beta test” first month, we’re ready to put Create Digital Motion into high gear, so I’m really looking forward to August. (Yes, unlike Web 2.0, we don’t plan to be in beta forever.) See you soon, on motion or music.