Deckboy

Databend reads the frame out as a signal and plays it through an audio chain — a delay with feedback, a filter, a wavefolder — then paints what comes back. The look people chase by opening a picture in an audio editor, on a live cue and on a knob. Its opposite number, audioprint, draws the sound the deck has just played through the picture; put one of each on a cue and they bend each other.

Projection mapping, in perspective. A layer pinned onto a steep board folds along the diagonal when it is drawn linear; switch it to perspective and the board is flat, its far end properly smaller. Drag the four corners on the programme monitor, and the programme, the recording and the stream all carry it.

The arcade lower third, one of 52 looks: the name in Deckboy's pixel face, a hard shadow, and a slow wobble for as long as it is up. Its colours and size can be set from a Companion button.

A web page and a slide deck, on the same list as a clip. The page is rendered into the programme and keeps updating; the deck is a PDF, PowerPoint or Keynote file, imported as one cue per slide with its notes.

Text mode redraws any picture in real characters, darkest to brightest. Turn the columns up and the face resolves out of the letters; every mark is still a character.

Effects on a live cue, switched on the beat without interrupting the picture. Fifty-two of them, every parameter on an oscillator, and the recording keeps every frame.

Nine more looks, one frame. Rendered by Deckboy; the checkerboard shows the luma key’s transparency, and strobe is held at frame 0. See the effect rack → Footage: Tears of Steel, Blender Foundation, CC BY 3.0.

Presenter view is an output type of its own, so it takes its own display. Here it is part-way through a build: the live slide holds still while the notes advance a step at a time, the part already spoken greys out, and the footer counts what is left before the next cue.

Deckboy Mini is the one-deck player that ships beside the desk: point deckboy-mini at clips or a folder and it plays them fullscreen through the same engine, takes the same remote commands on the same port, and the whole show runs from the keyboard in its terminal, over SSH too: find a cue by name, queue the next one, stop after this one, shuffle, crossfade. It comes inside every download, and on its own as a small download for Windows, macOS, Linux and the Raspberry Pi. Read its miniature manual →