I've worked on a few different live coding environments in the past, but now I thought I would try to make something simple with Python that could later maybe form the basis for a bigger tool.

Practically every film or video you watch these days is made up from thousands of 8x8 blocks of pixels described by a tiny stream of bits taking up just a fraction of the size of the original uncompressed data.

When the bitrate is high and the compression was done well (for example in a BluRay film), it can be almost impossible to tell this while the image is changing and you aren't sitting close to the screen.

1:1 crop from a 7D RAW video frame. Processed with RawTherapee (sharpening, noise reduction).

A while ago I bought a Canon 7D DSLR camera to use for taking pictures and making videos. It's had a good life so far, producing thousands of pictures and many videos from different events.

Some of the most interesting shaders are self contained 4 dimensional worlds defined entirely by maths. With a powerful GPU rendering them in real time at 60 frames per second, they can look utterly stunning.

But what to do in case you don't have the most powerful GPU to enjoy these?

Well, if you are willing to give up on interaction, another option is to render the shader frames to a file and create a video from them.

So far I've posted 9 articles here covering different techniques for making OpenGL shaders.

For those of you that have been following and trying things out, I thought this might be a good place for a recap.

I introduced the different built-in functions of GLSL as we needed them to achieve different goals, but at some point you might have been wishing for a compact reference to all the available functions.