Hi all,
I'm probably diving into programmatic visuals in the upcoming months. My goal at this point is to be able to create audio or midi driven visuals from my live set. Nothing fancy, more of a "proof of concept" thing, so in the future I can create a tighter integration between my live set and the visuals, avoiding (or complementing?) working with a VJ.

My main candidates for now are jitter, vvvv and processing, as I've seen some pretty interesting stuff made with all of them. Jitter seems really cool, and having it work under MAX is nice because it would reinforce my investigation in that tool. Cons I can think: it's paid. I don't know how good (or bad) it behaves under Windows. I could go to the PD+GEM way, but PD seemed quite user unfriendly for my tastes. Not even close to MAX yet.

vvvv seems nice too, and for what i see they care about documentation and the look and feel of the app, not to mention that they are currently using it integrated with live (see OSCGlue screenshots at their site) which is my main sequencer. it's also designed for Windows from the ground up. Don't know how powerful it is, how reliable, etc. Oh and it's free . Would love to hear some real world input from you guys.

And then there's processing. Programming in Java is cool to me, as It's a language I already know. I know of a few people working with it locally and that's a good point for sure. Free also. As far as I know it's a completely different beast to the other two platforms, as it doesn't rely on graphical programming connecting objects onscreen, etc, you get the idea.

For now i would be inclined to go vvvv. Similar to jitter, but free, with a growing user community. What are your opinions regarding that? What else should I take into account?

And what books do you recommend reading for digital image processing to complement learning a particular tool?

I'd love to hear what are your experiences...