![](\"http:\/\/users.aber.ac.uk\/hmd1\/pgfaces.jpg\")
\r\nIt’s strange the way that knowledge can change the way we see things. I\r\ncan’t see a live video feed without wondering how it was put together; how the\r\neffects were done; how it was mixed to make a (more or less unified) visual\r\nexperience… and the gig I went to on Friday (Peter Gabriel, Birmingham)\r\nreally made me think. Cameras, live video manipulation, and cool\r\ncomputer vision effects have really changed the live music experience.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
The first time I noticed the use of live video effects in earnest was at an\r\nArctic Monkeys gig in Grenoble, in early 2010. They’d used small screens at the\r\nfront of the stage which were linked to cameras around the musicians, and which\r\nprojected retro-style black and white images of the band in real time\r\n(actually, if I remember correctly, they were sepia tinted for quite a lot of\r\nthe show). These videos had been processed to give an old school\r\ntv-not-quite-tuned-in effect – it was quite impressive to see live\r\nvideo editing, on the fly, applied to about 8 camera feeds at the same time.\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\n
Fast forward 5 years or so, and now I can say that Peter Gabriel’s live show\r\ntakes this to the next level. Small cameras are now ubiquitous and they\r\ncertainly were on stage on Friday; it seemed as though some instruments, most\r\nlights, and a couple of the people were wearing little video cameras available\r\nfor live feeding into the stadium display (I’m not sure how many cameras there\r\nwere, but my guess is “over 20”). Having only seen the show once I can’t tell how precisely choreographed it was, but my intuition is that there’s quite a\r\nbit of variation from night to night so you can’t just have it programmed in\r\nadvance (“oh, we’re halfway through Sledgehammer, let’s cut to the gopro on the\r\ndrums for 12 seconds<\/i>“).<\/p>\r\n\r\n
A photo of the show, stolen from PG’s facebook page<\/small><\/p>\r\n
Perhaps unsurprisingly for an artist who’s always been at the forefront of\r\nvisual effects and music, this gig provided quite the feast for the eyes. Pretty\r\nmuch each song was accompanied by a different set of computer-vision driven VFX\r\non the big screens. I spotted (I think) some hough circles, some edge\r\nenhancement, lots of interesting noise effects, colour channel splitting with\r\ndifferent delays on R, G and B (cheap effect but quite trippy, actually), some\r\nmore generic motion delay, and some fairly serious looking cool 3D\/depth\r\nimaging, probably driven via something like a Microsoft Kinect. Some of this might well have been precomputed, but a lot was done on the fly1<\/sup>.<\/p>\r\n\r\n Actually, it’s kind of strange; whilst there’s a lot of major video\r\nprocessing, done in real time, from a set of cameras … it’s a simultaneously\r\ntechnical and low-tech extravaganza. The lights are controlled by actual people\r\nand not robots; there were five great big triffid-like lighting rigs being\r\npushed around the stage by 3 people each. There were more lighting people\r\nhiding in a gantry with spotlights. I spotted eight people<\/b> lurking in the\r\nrigging, accessed by little rope ladders. This is a workforce intensive show.\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\n And the music? Well that was just fucking awesome. From the opening acoustic\r\nnumbers, to the fantastic way the band dropped into electric half way through\r\nFamily Snapshot, playing The Family And The Fishing Net (really not sure what\r\nit’s about but it’s always been my favourite, a dirty spooky creepy epic of a\r\nsong, only improved by being played LOUD and live), skipping around Solsbury\r\nHill, then playing the So album the entire way through (in order, with the\r\noriginal lineup), and closing with Biko, dedicated to young people who put\r\ntheir lives on the line to protest injustice (particularly the recent Mexican\r\nstudents). From the start to the finish it was awesome. I think it was crowd\r\npleasing for both the passing fans and the diehards like me. Also, that man\r\nreally<\/i> knows how to work a stage. I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a gig as\r\nmuch for a long time. <\/p>\r\n\r\n So, as a vision researcher, I had to think – well wouldn’t that be a fun\r\nproject? You could do some really remarkable live stuff with 3D\/2.5D video\r\nmixing, feature tracking, pose estimation… get some real cutting edge computer vision into\r\nthe performance. (Doing more lightweight processing like they do now would\r\nalso make a great dissertation – open source live VFX for performance,\r\nanyone?).<\/p>\r\n 1<\/sup>Someone’s bound to comment now saying that this is all trivial with aftereffects plugins or something…<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s strange the way that knowledge can change the way we see things. I can’t see a live video feed without wondering how it was put together; how the effects were done; how it was mixed to make a (more or less unified) visual experience… and the gig I went to on Friday (Peter Gabriel, Birmingham) really made me think. Cameras, live video manipulation, and cool computer vision effects have really changed the live music experience. The first time I noticed the use of live video effects in earnest was at an Arctic Monkeys gig in Grenoble, in early 2010. They’d used small screens atRead More →<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[54,74],"class_list":["entry","author-handee","post-1349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-geekiness","tag-self","tag-vision"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1349"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1502,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349\/revisions\/1502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hannahdee.wales\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}