Post Mortem

Having finished everything this afternoon, I believe the time has come for a post-mosrtem-what went right, what went wrong, what could have been better and what I learned along the way.
First, what went right-
We set out to create a visual interaction between the audience and the performer in a manner that kept them moving, to see how the actions of one room are changing the actions of the other. We did this by means of a directors wand and moving music/sound. All of this we accomplished. As an artistic piece-the idea remained steady from conception until execution. People enjoyed the video I chose, and the patches looked nice, responding to the wand and interacting with the sound nicely.
What went wrong-
Hardware.

Not the wand, mind you-that worked really nicely and I give Dylan lots of credit for setting it up. When I say hardware I'm reffering to just about everything else-from the accelerometer to the lab setup. Originally it was believed that the accelerometer would be bigger (ie-atleas as large as a fingernail). Still, this was something that Dylan overcame-rather it was the output of the chip. Only giving the acceleration in a limited (jittery) fashion) was a major setback as far as the project was concerned. Beyond this, there was a miscommunication at a crucial moment where I was told only range from zero to five could be inputted and it ended up being around zero to a hundred that I could have gone with. This, as mentioned previous caused me no end of trouble with rewriting the patches. Well-I suppose there was an end, I did it after all.
Still, all of that pales to the final hurdle which were the computers themselves that the program ended up running on. Two slow G3 (maybe G4) machines that just didn't have the power to handle that much simultaneuos video input. It caused the computers to slow down to a point where the patches lost nearly all their appeal. One of my patches had to be reduced from a five by five grid of craziness to a single video with nothing other than contrast changing. That's inexcusable, and soemthing that could only have been found out the night before when everything was put together. The other patch just went unbearably slow. On top of this, only half of the patches I ended up making ended up getting used.
I'm going to avoid getting into other problems ranging from a lack of communication to last minute unwanted fixes cause I think I covered the crucial ones
I believe that's enough complaining for now-
Let's move on to what I learned, shall we?
Limiting my field of view merely to my part of the project, while realistic, is definitely a recipe for failure. Even if I just have a small knowledge of the other factors going on in a group, that's better than nothing. I was left ot my devices to work on what I wanted to work on-namely, the visuals, and I appreciate that, but clearly more needed to be done in places like the final compilation. The idea was good, the execution could have been better, and it's the sort of thing that could have been solved witha little brainstorming of what could very likely happen, and a consequential practice setup before the night before. These are all just abstract lessons in planning with a group, what really needs to be focused on is MAX.
I came into the class very confused as to what all the lines and boxes do, and now I feel I have a good control over them. Programming with them is no longer a completely foreign process, and that's definitely a skill that will be helpful when I transport the knowledge to some other programs I've seen out there with a similar set up. My knowledge of what can be done with video and how to do it has greatly increased, and I'm well aware that every video editing program will pale in comparison in complexity henceforth. Even though I was the "visual guy" and I spent a good deal of time searching for images, I'd say I spent that much more time working in programming, and I'm glad to be leaving the class with the knowledge.
Specifically from teh project the lessons ranged from MAX to group organization, and in the end I'd say it turned out a lot like what I could have expected.

Hopefully in the near future I'll get a chance to post the last of my patches-the final patches I did, even if in the end we weren't really able to use half of them.