[sdiy] Modular Video?

[Dr Strangelove]

On a related note, about a year ago I corresponded with a William Etra.  He 
is a professor at University of Illinois (I think).  He was one of the 
inventors of the Rutt/Etra video synth.  He sells demos of his early art 
made with the system (It uses Direct video raster manipulation).  He also 
put me into contact with someone who had a schematic of the particular unit. 
  The person said it was in terrible shape and would have to be re-drawn.  
I'm not yet at a level to build a large video synth from scratch so I didn't 
try to acquire the schematic.  I did continue correspondance with Mr. (Dr.?) 
Etra, who is a really swell guy.

Audiovisualizers.com seems to indicate that old Buchla synths could be used 
for video synthesis.  It sais something about they have to be video synced.  
If someone could find out how that was done with old buchla modules, 
couldn't the same thing be done with our Moog filters, and our OTA VCAs and 
our oscillators, and our....?  I've often thought that video synthesis (If I 
could get spaced out pictures and patterns) would be just as fun as audio 
synthesis.  In some ways DIY makes even more sense for video synthesizers 
since there is NOTHING available commercially to make video synthesis 
(unless its computerized and d*g*t*l, which I'm assuming is not comparable 
to most of the cool looking and knobified video synthesis stuff on 
audiovisualizers, like the Rutt/Etra and the Spectron) .

         -=<Jonathan Pratt>=-
       (Phdinfunk at hotmail.com)





_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp