Ed: My VJ Day spilleth over a bit, so just a little more VJ coverage before we return to the usual music stuff. -PK

Holly Daggers is another superstar VJ, having toured with folks like Fischerspooner and the Black Eyed Peas. (Holly’s probably reading this, so maybe I shouldn’t mention the Hillary Duff thing — bad mojo.) Don’t miss the free Creative Commons VJ clips and futuristic fetish visual inspirations on her site. Since Holly makes better eye candy than, for example, I do, she’s found ways of inserting herself into her VJ imagery, in several videos famously in a nurse’s outfit.

Of course, to insert people into videos requires chroma-keying, the “weather man” effect that has a well-earned bad rap for looking cheesy. The problem is inaccurate chroma-keying, in which the camera has trouble distinguishing foreground from background. That’s where the Reflecmedia Chromaflex comes in; it’s a special reflective surface that helps the keying process. I got to see Holly using this with body-painted and costumed dancers at a recent Crobar gig, and the effect looks terrific. The magic comes from the 3M Scotchlite material used in reflective jackets.

Software versus hardware: Holly and I have a little disagreement going. Holly is a hardware person: if the VJ tool runs on a computer, she doesn’t want to touch it. She argues that hardware is more reliable and outputs better-quality video, and of course I staunchly disagree and say that . . . uh . . . well . . . actually, usually I try to change the subject because I know she’s got a point. One thing we can agree on is the general coolness of the Korg Entrancer, an $800 piece of gear that melds a KAOSS pad with video capabilities. Rock-solid. Add an Edirol V-4 and you’ve got some great VJ hardware; even a lot of software VJs carry some of this around. See Korg’s Leslie Buttonow write-up what happens when the Entrancer first hit Holly and Eric Dunlap’s Eyewash VJ party. (In a word: think drool.)

Thanks to everyone who’s writing in about VJ Day. It’s funny, conventional wisdom is that musicians don’t care about VJing, but here among the hip technorati of CDM, of course, things are different. And with VJing moving out of the “psychedelia” area into a range of aesthetics and styles, I expect you’ll hear more soon. Our friend James Polanco of the superb Fake Science Lab Report podcast writes in to tell us about some rising VJ superstars:

Mat Hale is a very close friend of mine that I have worked with on multiple events here in San Francisco when I was djing out all the time. Mat has also worked with his friend Vello on a ton of projects down in LA (and internationally). Sting’s tour, Jay-Z, etc. Vello is one of the founders of OVT out of Chicago that handled Rabbit in the Moons shows, all kinds of rave’s in the 90s and MOMA’s yearly event. Vello and Mat also did vid and installation work for Cirque Du Soleil & Zumanity Orchestra and Club Ice in Las Vegas. Vello is doing a ton of touring right now (just got off being Sasha’s VJ) and Mat is doing some local gigs around LA. Both are amazing, amazing producers that are creating next level content.

Indeed, for a great overview of what VJing is all about, check out Apple.com’s writeup of Vello. Thanks, James — other lurking VJs or Friends of VJs, give us a holler!

Not one but two major upgrades hit the Mac VJ market this month. Aside from Livid Union 1.5, there’s Modul8 V2. Some serious power features: there’s audio input triggering as well as standard MIDI learn, a preview panel, special techniques for saving your set without taking a performance hit, and tons of special filters and effects. Add to this power user features like Python scripting and interface construction, and this is a serious tool. There’s even 3D and particles. Wild. Like many VJ apps, there are demos available, so go take a look. (via vjcentral and several readers — thanks!)

As musicians, these kinds of features sound familiar: “Four effects layers per channel , larger clip bank, integrated MIDI templates, effects triggers, clip sequencer, easy-to-use LFOs, new effects and parameters.” Some kind of new sampler/synth, maybe? Actually, it’s the new features in the upgrade to the VJ app, Livid Union 1.5, for Mac OS X. Fortunately, unlike hardware “video synthesizers” like Edirol’s CG-8 ($5295 list), this will set you back less than the price of a car — more like US$299. Sounds good to me. Union features lots of MIDI control, so if you’re looking for a “performance VJ synth,” this could be a good option. Expect an all-out VJ app review soon; competition is getting fierce.

PC users, fret not: Plenty of Windows-based apps, too, even though the VJ community does tend to tilt Mac. More soon.

I’d be remiss on VJ Day if I didn’t point to some great sources of VJ information. Above all, the greatest out there is the terrific Website VJ Central. Think of it a bit like the EM411 of VJing; you’ll find discussion boards, articles, news (both of the product and event variety), calls for VJs, and (if you’re having trouble picking a tool), software reviews, plus a lot more.

While not strictly a VJ site, Video Thing certainly belongs among your RSS feeds for video-related oddities. (No, Music Thing is not becoming a franchise, though the blogger’s a friend of Tom’s.)

“But what about paper?” you say. For reading compatible with use on subways and toilets, you’ll have to wait for VJ-Book. It’s a promising project currently in seek of a publisher; in the mean time you can “beta test” as a reader.

Oh, yeah, and of course there’s this site, too. I should have more VJ-related coverage soon because of some projects I’m working on, but in the meantime check out a few of my previous stories:

Report from the LAVA VJ party in LA
“VST for video”: the FreeFame video plug-in format
Expensive video hardware: Korg Kaptivator, Edirol CG-8, and Pioneer DVJ-X1
Free software: Neuromixer for scratching with video
Profile of a VJ: Melissa Ulto, aka Mixxy

Got more favorite resources, or want to pimp your own blog / portfolio? Hit comments or drop me a line.

In celebration of tonight’s monthly Eyewash party here in NYC, CDM brings you a day of VJ coverage. And yes, I’ll be on tonight, so New Yawkas, stop by and say hi. To get things rolling, we’ve got a letter (cue the Official Mailbag Theme Song). Wally writes:

I saw that you are going to be VJing soon, and I wanted to ask what tools you use to VJ, and also, what is your approach? I’ve been asked by some friends of mine to VJ a gig of theirs on July 9th, and while I’ve played around with a couple tools here and there (Union, Resolume, Grid) I’m a little intimidated by the project.

At any rate, a friend of mine loaned me a Panasonic video mixer, so I’m planning on running Resolume on the PC, and either Grid or Union on my Powerbook — can’t decide which. My goal is to have tightly integrated video with the audio, but it seems like that’s more difficult with VJ apps for some reason. I realize that one has to have an exact number of frames to get video to loop in sync with audio at certain BPMs, but very few VJ apps seem to have clip playback control that starts and stops with MIDI clock.

(Read more for the answer)

Here’s more on Steam Driven, the interactive performance that mixed music and steam-powered machines, from composer Stuart Smith. Stuart writes:

The show went well and also sold-out. A nice piece of theater as every visitor had to manually stoke the fire with a chunk of coal,
thus waiting for enough “steam” pressure to begin the show. During this the Engineerium owner to give a brilliant introduction and then the visitors were led into the main hall
where the 16 ton machine was manually started by one of the engineers. The show begins!

The laser triggers gave us:
1. A tap tempo which gave us a central BPM (exactly 86.5)
2. A LFO phase reset if needed.

We used 3 different Infrared proximity sensors placed near moving arms and gears which gave us:
1. Control over audio pan, timbre, amplitude, pitch, loop-point, etc.
2. Control over video color, playback rate, clip, start-stop, movement etc.

I wrote a master Max/MSP patch which encompassed all the sensors and translated this into useable data which was sent over the LAN to our laptops and also to 8 other remote computers each with it’s own video projector and video clips we created.

We wrote a basic Audio/Visual “score” to follow as we played live using laptops and guitars(!) utilizing all the incoming data from the machine. A great show but “loads” of programming! This will the first of many to come, maybe NYC?

Thanks, Stuart! Hope you do make it to NYC — or I make it over there, one or the other! -PK

Spencer Kiser, another whiz kid from NYU’s ITP program, gives CDM our first look at his SpinCycle. It’s a new take on the turntable: instead of tracking grooves on a disc, the device reads colors and produces sounds (and hypnotic colors). Check out Spencer’s flickr gallery for pics for now, but he promises more documentation and video soon.

Another reason I’m jealous of Spencer: he made the Vancouver conference on new musical instrument interfaces. Check out what looks like an interactive washboard-computer interface! More on all this soon . . .

We continue to interrupt Moog Week for Weird Plugin Day. Forget parody plugins — truth is nearly as strange as fiction. Just watch the latest on KVR:

Turkish Folk Instrument goes Virtual: First, there’s the Volko Baglama (via). The thousand year-old Turkish folk instrument known as a Baglama or saz has been converted to Windows VSTi. Great; I can see it now: the master Baglama player shows up to a gig only to have been replaced by some youngster with an Oxygen8. (at least it doesn’t sound half bad.)

Great Plug-in? BS! The “unfortunate plug-in branding” award has to go to a developer named bismark, who calls his plugins things like “bs-16,” “bs-1,” and “bs-spectrum.” My suggested motto: “if you sound good, you must be full of BS.” And if you’ve been reading KVR really religiously, you know the BS-16 just fixed a problem with an infinite loop on some drum presets. Hey, we’ve all known drummers like that . . .

Now With Seizures! Of course, my favorite odd plugin of all time has to be the Hypnos Vocoder. Is it really capable of finding an entrainment frequency of your brain? Based on what I know as the kid of two psychologists, probably not without dedicated biofeedback hardware. But come on: what other DirectX plugin costs US$800 AND can cause a seizure? (Tom at MusicThing covered this in December while I was too afraid, but hey, always worth a mention.)