VGA Expropriator – analogue video synthesizer

“this”:http://www.mediumrecords.com/vs0/vs001.html is my first completed video-synthesizer.

!http://www.mediumrecords.com/vs0/vs001desk-sm.jpg!:http://www.mediumrecords.com/vs0/vs001.html

it adds the wave-forms of audio inputs onto the VGA output of a computer.
it can be patched in ways which turn it into a big, fast, and very noisy audio-visual glitch machine.

!http://www.mediumrecords.com/vs0/screenshot720-2-tb.jpg!:http://www.mediumrecords.com/vs0/vs001.html

“more over on project-page>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>”:http://www.mediumrecords.com/vs0/vs001.html

15 thoughts on “VGA Expropriator – analogue video synthesizer”

  1. Looks very interesting. I was hoping for a schematic, but wasn’t quite able to deduce some of the connections shown in the wiring picture :P

  2. Great stuff, real nice :)
    I love the interior, pure chaos.
    I have a slight curiosity regarding how you manage to mix the beams with the video at such high resolutions and not lose video quality, I mean, it needs a lot of bandwith, right?

  3. bq. how you manage to mix the beams with the video at such high resolutions and not lose video quality, I mean, it needs a lot of bandwith, right?

    i’m going to claim luck on that one ; )
    but yeah, at 120Hz refresh rate, i had one colour component start to separate because it was wired with a twisted pair and the rest weren’t (well presumably that was the reason). some tens of nano seconds out it would be. was on a breakout box mind you but still, less than 1/2 a metre of cable.
    there is kind of a point where a connection starts to become a “transmission line” and this point gets shorter at higher speeds apparently.

    but i’ve been using high-speed cmos mainly, but not exclusively. one of the real 80’s type posterization effects (pretty much just a nand-gate) looked way better with a normal cmos than with the HC equiv… or maybe that was a ttl actually.. hm. i’ve already forgotten which one i used in the end… but different varieties of the same chips do give different visual qualities…. an underlying factor here is that “bad” quality becomes good aesthetics in many respects.

  4. Yeah, it is a bit hard to see what is connected to what!

    What’s going on with horizontal position? And this cue/wiper fade you talk about?

  5. brian, you can’t blame me for having so many wuestions but for a nerd like me, block diagrams are just the beginning!

    How do you get the signals in? VGA I assume, then it splits them for the breakout which mixes them…

    Then what? I know they go back in, but how are they mixed with audio, and how do the digital chips control stuff ?

  6. Brilliant! Really top-notch work.
    These are the exact effects I want to create.
    I wish I understood the circuits enough to create my own vidsynth.
    Will you be selling these at some point?

  7. Dont know the difference. I’d call this artsy… rather than geeky. I’m sure there are thousands of geeks screaming about how there is no RF shielding and every cable is not coax and he didn’t spend $99999 for PCB manufacturing…

    Either way… I solved my “mixer” problem,thing. Instead of rotary knobs, I’ll use 9 spst switches… I think it provides me more flexibility…

    What I’ll do is wire 1 to R, 1 to B, 1 to G, and that all 3 to red on the monitor/whatever. Then, 1 to B, 1 to G, 1 to R, and wire that to blue.

    So you could combine let’s say… red and blue, and send them to blue channel, or send red to blue and green.

    Cool!

    Now… How do you get these vertical audio traces?

  8. bq. What I’ll do is wire 1 to R…

    this sounds like a decent system…
    been trying to get my head around colour mixing for a while…
    “problem” i have is connecting knobs to ground turns everything into sort of a weird network of interrelated everything.

    next colour mixer i plan to build will have 3 knobs for each colour… one to cut each channel and the other 2 to send the source to each other colour output. so the green output you can turn both knobs to G to pass the green source straight to the green output, or one knob to send G source to R and the other knob to send G source to B… not sure how this will work with 9 knobs, only tried it with one colour source, and the results were quite weird and unexpected.

    i think that this will be quite slow going initially as far as setting up… but i’d like to host a diy video synth forum to get a bit of “open source” action going on the video hack front. a lot of people have been asking about how to get their feet wet with this sort of thing so a forum would seem to make sense.

    this is the address: http://vidisynth.mediumrecords.com/forum/ and i do hope to get some basic info and maybe tutorials on there soon (ish)

  9. btw:

    bq. there are thousands of geeks screaming about how there is no RF shielding

    no way! the whole box is one big shield.

    oh, and about the forum… those of you out there who know a thing about logic, video, audio, etc. (you know who you are) … please just register a user name and start posting some shit!

  10. will you publish the schematic at some point, or have you decided to keep it secret ?

    I think that a lot of people (including me) would benefit from a schematic, since hands-on is the best way to learn and understand,
    specially for people with limited electronic skills. And it would likely give a bit of life at the quite dead forum.

  11. bq. will you publish the schematic at some point, or have you decided to keep it secret ?

    a bit of both actually.

    but the forum’s not dead… it’s still in the foetus stage.

    these things take time…

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