Advanced Techniques in Media Management, Sequencing and Playback – Peter Sistrom

Workshop: Advanced Techniques in Media Management, Sequencing and Playback

In this workshop Peter Sistrom will share his experience devising a flexible system for media sequencing and playback in many different and demanding scenarios over the last six years. Over time he has become familiar with the evolving set of features in TouchDesigner that have allowed this system to come to life and be repurposed in a range of projects that include: earth shaking visual music shows, bombastic interactive performances, and completely rock solid long term media playback installations. All the while he’s dreamed of rounding out the foundation of these tools to the point of being able to show, share, discuss, and evolve them with the larger TouchDesigner community.

In the session Sistrom aims to describe the system he has developed and the reasons why he believes this infrastructure is useful in confronting different scenarios while striving to remain as light and flexible as possible.

Additional topics that will be explored include using tags for subjective description, using touch network hierarchies for tree browsing nested show assets, media management, techniques for timeline interfacing, and back-end methodologies that can be used in system building. These themes will be drawn together by an explanation of how these assets can be used in runtime systems.

Ultimately, this session hopes to inspire, add to, and continue the conversation around how the TouchDesigner community can start to share, develop, and enhance each other’s foundations so we can all keep pushing the envelope!

Instructor: Peter Sistrom
Peter Sistrom is a visual artist, designer, and multimedia architect. While studying traditional architecture at Virginia Tech University, he developed design skills while also gaining a deep appreciation for music and visual forms of musical expression. After getting his Bachelor of Architecture in 2006 and following a few years working as an architect, Sistrom travelled to Los Angeles to venture deeper into the world of audiovisual performance and interactive media. Along with his friend, Matt Davis, he created [namethemachine] as an outlet for the duo’s creative endeavors in the interactive audiovisual performance realm.

From 2013 onward Sistrom and Davis have evolved [namethemachine] into a business that provides bespoke cutting edge performance solutions to like-minded artists and performers. Some of their projects include Bassnectar’s live tour visuals system (U.N.S. or Ultimate Nerd Server), Sound Tribe Sector 9’s 2012 Great Cycle Spectacles tour, numerous interactive performances for Intel, and David Gilmore’s 2016 projection mapped Hollywood Bowl performance.