NATO.0+55+3d modular, page 11/14
The Downside
The Downside
Although I'm largely enthusiastic about it, there are a few areas where NATO could be improved.
- Documentation: While NATO comes with full documentation (over 500 pages of SimpleText instructions), it doesn't adhere to the Max standard of example-based help with tutorials, which gives it a steeper-than-necessary learning curve. That said, it's actually pretty simple to get a basic project off the ground. But a more comprehensive help system would be valuable, and assist new users immeasurably.
A couple of people have done some work in this area. xampl@hotmail.com has built a pretty comprehensive set of Max-style help files for NATO, which you can download here -- they make a great tutorial, if you want to explore the objects. Timothy Place, also, has begun an ambitious set of help files. And if you don't mind the text files, you can download modular.ref which permits you to open them up from within Max, instead of having to switch to SimpleText to check a command.
- Overdrive: Max has two modes, Overdrive ON and OFF. With Overdrive OFF, onscreen events and processing are given equal time, which can result in slightly inaccurate timing for music. With Overdrive ON, calculation and time-critical processing is done at the interrupt level, at the expense of onscreen events. Currently, NATO does not work properly with Overdrive ON, which is a real shame, because it limits the integration possibilities between NATO and MSP, which operates best with Overdrive ON. At present, if you want to use the two packages together, you'll have to live with slight irregularities in MSP-based musical timing, so that your video displays properly.
[Jeffrey Burns has written a patch which helps to `correct` these inaccuracies by substituting the Macintosh system clock as the timing basis for Max (instead of Max's internal clock)].
- Reliance on QuickTime: This is actually both an upside and a downside. NATO is cleverly built on top of QuickTime, which means that as QuickTime grows, improves and supports more image formats and codecs, so does NATO. That's the upside. The downside is that, right now, there are areas of QuickTime that truly disappoint -- speed of compositing (the copymodes) and DV media handling are the two main areas that bother me. I'd love it if these problem areas were addressed by overriding the default QuickTime routines with more efficient code.
- Speed: Most of NATO's basic signal processing routines are independent of QuickTime -- point processing is just math, handled by your computer's microprocessor. Many of the supplied objects are a little slow, and would benefit in both elegance and usefulness with some basic optimization. Such basic functions as compositing and matrix transformations are much slower than they ought to be. Cropping (`242.decoupage`), too, takes a lot longer that it should. I suspect that, in these cases, NATO's development team has chosen to rely on QuickTime toolbox routines instead of doing the not-so-hard work of writing their own, more efficient code. Since NATO is advertised as a `real-time` image manipulation environment, it would be sensible for the developers to pay some extra attention to runtime speed.
- Price: NATO is not cheap -- the basic NATO modular distribution costs $549.54. To put this into context, the bundle of Max and MSP together is $495. Simply put, NATO is priced far beyond other retail Max extensions, or even Max itself. Historically, the Max user community has been fairly small, and largely academic or artistic. Most 3rd party objects for Max have been free. I'll grant, though, that compared to many other video packages for the Macintosh, NATO is at the low end of the pricing spectrum.
Given the price of the core package, one might hope that the extended distribution externals were less expensive. They range from $74.47 to $274.47. Some of them (like `242.nr+`) would have been nice and logical additions to the main package, and others (like `242.fireuire` -- the object, not the package) don't work as well as their price tag might suggest. Still others, (like `242.gl`) are fabulous, and probably worth the money. In the end, though, functionality is functionality, and if you require it, it's available for the price.
I think that NATO's cost is a downside because it might be disuasive or prohibitive to a large group of potential users, most notably artists. The pricing slows its adoption and use by the very people who would most benefit a product like NATO (if you accept that good work made with a good product is ultimately good for the product). 0f0003.MACHIN3NKUNST does offer discounts on site licenses, institutional licenses and academic licenses.
all materials on this site (text, images, etc.) © 2000-2001 Jeremy Bernstein