The VeeJay applications implement a pioneeristical approach to video manipulation in realtime, taking advantage of the high computational power offered by personal computers nowadays. If you're active in the field of media and visual art, dance or scenografy, this software can be interesting and sometimes very useful to your research.
FreeJ is a vision mixer: an instrument for realtime video manipulation used in the fields of dance teather, veejaying, medical visualisation and TV.
FreeJ lets you interact with multiple layers of video, filtered by effect chains and then mixed together. Controllers can be scripted for keyboard, midi and joysticks, to manipulate images, movies, live cameras, particle generators, text scrollers, flash animations and more. All the resulting video mix can be shown on multiple and remote screens, encoded into a movie and streamed live to the internet.
FreeJ can be controlled locally or remotely, also from multiple places at the same time, using its slick console interface; can be automated via javascript and operated via MIDI and Joystick. Especially the javascript interpreted makes it an easy to learn language to make your first step in the wornderful world of programming.
More documentation on freej can be found in /opt/video/share/freej especially the scripting reference. A user friendly tutorial can be found online, and more information at its homepage on freej.dyne.org.
Other tools included in dyne:bolic are useful to be employed in different ways on realtime video: EffecTV can apply realtime effects to images, one by one, realizing "distortion mirrors" and other possible funny uses; Xaos can let you explore the psychedelical word of chaos mathematics and fractals :)
A remarkable piece of software is Pure Data which together with various extensions realizes a tool to connect various processing units in a visual scripting fashion, to create visionary audio machines and interactive video tools. Pure Data, also called PD, is as powerful as complicated to learn; it helps the fact that is getting now adopted by various media-art schools around the world as a free and open source for students to realize their projects. From the wide community of digital artists and creatives using it in all kinds of interactive installations and performances, the Goto10 crew joined the development of dyne:II to implement the pure.dyne software module which provides you everything you need to start using Pure Data right out of the box, without installation problems: check their website at http://puredyne.goto10.org to download a copy and add it to your dyne:bolic system.