hello there
i'm getting started with gem and have a handful of questions that i haven't been able to answer with the tutorial or manual... i'm planning on trying to use supercollider for my sound meanwhile sending OSC messages to PD so that i can control Gem. these questions don't reflect that yet; i'm still dealing with the basic quirks of gem and pd.
let's get started... i'm running Mac OS 10.4, am using PD 0.37-2, and Gem 0.90 for G3.
for most of my following questions, i'm a little unsure of where the problems lie - i.e. is it machine specific, is it gem specific, is it pd-specific...?
here it goes...
- is the pd-list the best place to ask basic gem questions, or should
they be sent to gem-dev?
- is there a way to make the Gem output window come to the front and
sit on top of the other open pd windows? i can't move the window, and i know that's because you can only control that with the 'position' command to gemwin (will that ever change?? it'd be nice to be able to drag it around...). but if i'm doing a fullscreen thing with gem, then my patch is stuck in front of the image, and i can't close the patch window or else that stops everything and closes the gem window too. so - can i hide the main patch window? is there a way to enable command-tilde(~) so that windows will come to the front? can i have the gem window in front of everything? i understood the parts of the manual that talk about changing monitor preferences to use two separtate screens, one for your patch and one for your gem-output, but unfortunatley that does not apply to my situation - i want to be able to display the Gem output on my laptop screen without anything in front of it for others to view and to have the patch stuff in the background. i don't intend to use extra computers in the process either. is this/will this be possible?
- all of the tutorials have all of their toggle switches set to the
OFF position, but whenever i open a tutorial and 'create' a genwin from scratch, all of the various geos that are supposed to be disabled instead pop-up on the screen, covering each other up. i then have to go to every point in the patch and toggle each gemhead on and then off in order to get the screen to go to its clear default OFF state. is there a way to have all of the gemhead's *really* start in the OFF state? i tried adding the -noloadbang flag thinking that that might help, but that wasn't it. it's kind of annoying to have to search around in all the subpatches for all the rogue geos and gemheads...
- i get lots and lots of errors when i use pix_image and pix_film with
pix_mix (tutorial 8) if the multiple pictures or videos being mixed together are not the exact same dimensions. will this limitation ever be changed, or is there already an easy way around this besides actually going and changing all of my images to the same size?
- i've found that pd won't stop playing sound from my quicktime movies
in the pix_film mixing examples (tutorial 8) even when i turn off the individual gemhead and/or 'auto' toggles. if i then 'destroy' the gemwin, the sound finally goes off with it after about a second, but as soon as i 'create' another gemwin the sound from the already stopped videos goes back on right where they left off... is there a way or will there be a way to make these videos and their soundtracks completely stop after starting?
alrighty. thanks so much for the help! adam