And when Bagpuss wakes up.....

[MikiStrange]

Dear John
It's been about a year and like a hungry cat sniffing round a favourite old bin I thought I might find a fish head or something.
How's it going? What's happened to Blueprint?
I know, your a busy bee and you haven't had time to wind up the BP clock.
I'm writing because while looking for a file I stumbled across a couple of hundred old unused VJ clips I had made and lamented their sorry state in a box in the attic. I decided to drop by and have a look at what was going on and not much on first impressions.
I've been retired from VJ/DJing for over a year now and have been without a PC for most of that time. It's all fixed now and I'm back writing music and thinking about video again....why oh why oh why do I punish myself with codecs, with framerates, with aspect ratios, with..etc, etc. I suppose I miss it all in a kind of weird way. I don't know what I'll do yet but maybe a music video for a track I'm recording.
Hopefully theres a serial port on my PC for my VJamm dongle, I haven't looked lately.
So off I trot, into the distance like a labouring donkey but I shall return and bother you again and you'll wish you'd switched the off button on the BP forum while you had the chance.
I'll leave you with your custard creams and programmers monthly till next time.
Hope you're well. Tell me what's what soon.

MikiStrange

[john_day_vjamm]

Hi Miki,
Good to hear from you.

edited out gibberish

[Gumby]

Is Blueprint 2 on its way? I'm looking forward to it!

I'm able to do some beta testing too.


It's been a while since I used blueprint actually, I'm going to use it for a gig on sat so I cranked it up yesterday.

Can I make a few suggestions on stuff? It's probably too late

[john_day_vjamm]

Hi Gumby,

Well, I wont promise anything this year since everything is in the air as surviving is the name of the game at the moment. I'm at a stage where the overall design and architecture is soldifying, but I'm always open to suggestions so please do jot some down here and i'll try to give an answer of done/doing/will do/addon or not in this application.

I'm always amazed that people still use blueprint, I'm afraid that once it was released I immediately moved on to developing the next version. I can only vaguely remember what it was like to use, pretty good at the time i think. Hope the gig goes well and pictures are always nice.

oh..and yes if it becomes stable and into beta, any current owners who want to have a go will get there mits on it first for sure.

[Gumby]

Sounds good. Ok some things which I don't really like about Blueprint at the moment:

The mixer is too small you can only fit 8 clips in at once, even though there are 24 spaces in the trigger shot window

Play/Pause buttons for each clip at the moment there doesn't seem to be a way of stopping a clip straight away. You have to wait for it to stop by taking it out of loop mode

Messy interface at the moment you can get confused with all the windows that are open. it would be good to have it as one locked down window. Also a more modern colour scheme would be nice too. It looks very 1999!

Easy to find features one of the reasons I use VJamm for most gigs is because everything is there, infront of you and not hidden under menus like in alot of other VJ programs. At the moment its a little like this in Blueprint, you have to search for the thing you want. If your trying to do something quickly in the heat of the moment it can be frustrating.


Input devices support for Macbook pro's running windows I don't know if this is just a general bug, but I can't utilise the inbuilt camera in my macbook pro. Its detected but only shows a black screen when started.

FreeFrame it would be nice if the freeframe effects has thumbnails in order to help you decide which one would be good. At the moment it can be difficult to guess which one you want to use without flicking through them all live.

Patches something I haven't managed to do so far is save clips/effects/settings in a patch like you can in VJamm. You can only save libraries of clips.


Thats all I can think of for now

[john_day_vjamm]

Hi Gumby, thank you for your input - i'll be a little obtuse with some of the answers because i dont want to say to much amount the software yet... also the new design does not overlay the old blueprint design in many places.

The mixer is too small you can only fit 8 clips in at once, even though there are 24 spaces in the trigger shot window
- depending how you use it (and if your machine will handle it) - you can preload 32 clips for triggering and mixing now.

Play/Pause buttons for each clip at the moment there doesn't seem to be a way of stopping a clip straight away. You have to wait for it to stop by taking it out of loop mode
- in Blueprint i believe you can stop the playback by using the SHIFT+triggerkey, and the 'P' key will toggle Pause for the currently active layer. but i've got play/pause buttons in new version

Messy interface at the moment you can get confused with all the windows that are open. it would be good to have it as one locked down window. Also a more modern colour scheme would be nice too. It looks very 1999!
- the multi-window design was for speed at the time, GL doesn't sit well with standard MS controls, and the colors were supposed to help you keep track which layer was active. new version is locked down to one window and the currently default theme is more modern/tidy

Easy to find features one of the reasons I use VJamm for most gigs is because everything is there, infront of you and not hidden under menus like in alot of other VJ programs. At the moment its a little like this in Blueprint, you have to search for the thing you want. If your trying to do something quickly in the heat of the moment it can be frustrating.
- yes i agree, it has been very hard to balance the GUI between ease of use and power, i think i'm mostly happy with the new one.

Input devices support for Macbook pro's running windows I don't know if this is just a general bug, but I can't utilise the inbuilt camera in my macbook pro. Its detected but only shows a black screen when started.
-this will be some bug/problem, I haven't got a mac to play with and even the new version wont be tested for this until a much later date.

FreeFrame it would be nice if the freeframe effects has thumbnails in order to help you decide which one would be good. At the moment it can be difficult to guess which one you want to use without flicking through them all live.
- this doesn't actualy work as well as you might think, some effects show up well on default settings but most dont. what was really needed was a supplied thumbnail by the authors, they also take alot of screen real estate up. this one is still floating for me.

Patches something I haven't managed to do so far is save clips/effects/settings in a patch like you can in VJamm. You can only save libraries of clips.
- i think the library includes the snapshots assign to slots (ie effect chains and settings for each slot), also each clip can have its own selection of snapshots saved, (channel params - take snaphot button). the patchs in the new version haven't been defined beyond the basic whole bus patch at the moment.

phew, hope that answered some questions, and thanks again for the input.

[john_day_vjamm]

ah.. an update on that 'inbuilt camera in my mac' problem

this article says that the built-in iSight camera can't be used by XP on a mac.

http://www.macworld.com/article/50374-2/2006/04/winmacfaq.html