As we strive for more immersive, cohesive shows, DMX is a great tool to have in our visualist kit. Whether a full theatre lighting rig or just a couple of dimmers and a strobe in a club, the ability to plug in and take control of an existing rig means that lighting can now work with your projections, not compete with them.

One very exciting piece of gear brought to Perth last year by artificialeyes was the uDMX USB DMX controller. The uDMX is exciting in a different way to gear such as the VJX16-4 or the VMS, rather than being a new and more VJ-friendly take on existing tech, it very common concept - the DMX controller - distilled down to its tiniest, purest form, and then open-sourced for good measure.

The Anyma guys have managed to fit all of the DMX control circuitry inside a regular XLR jack. This makes the uDMX about as compact as it’s possible for a DMX controller to be. As DMX uses regular 3- or 5-pin XLR jacks for cabling, you can literally grab the uDMX, some spare mic cable, an adapter or two, and then get your DMX on straight away! The uDMX-Midi Interface Software (Mac) is extremely simple, monitoring a MIDI input source and converting (scaling from 0-255 to 0-127) either Note-on or CC messages into DMX messages. These are sent through the uDMX on the same DMX channel as the MIDI message controller or note number. It also has the ability to offset messages, which gives a simple method of scanning around DMX channels to find out where lights and other gear are located without following cables or looking at jumpers. Anyma have also released a Max/MSP external (Mac, Linux and Windows), PD external, and a command line utility (Windows, Mac and Linux).

Gavin Morris has been working on an audiovisual setup with Ableton Live and Isadora, a tasty combination for any Windows or Mac user. Isadora, for those of you who don’t know, is a visually-focused modular patching tool. It’s similar to tools like Max/MSP/Jitter, but by emphasizing the practical needs of visual performance, it’s unusually usable when putting together real-world gigs. Its use by A/V dance troupe Troika Ranch (co-founder Mark Coniglio is also the tool’s creator) has also popularized it in modern dance circles.

Gavin has two tutorials for us to start. The first syncs up Live and Isadora, along the lines we ran here using Live by momo the monster:

AV Cutup Secrets: Using Lucifer & Live

Gavin writes:

It’s similar to Momo’s recent Tutorial but uses a free tool for the VST (Pluggo) and allows control from the Live interface (as opposed to within the VST) This allows you a lot more flexibility and means you can use Follow Actions, adjust loop lengths/positions in realtime and even create a slicer. It is Live>Isadora via OSC but could equally be to many other softwares and could equally use MIDI.

I’ve written a VST to go in slicer channels tool.

Sync Ableton Live to Isadora using a Pluggo VST from digital funfair on Vimeo.

Gavin warns us that the video may "put us off." At first I thought that meant it was NSFW or something, but … well, that’s not the problem. You’ll see. I leave it up to you to decide how you feel about it.

The second tutorial gives you the power of Emergency Broadcast Network-style A/V slicing:

I’ve done a tutorial for a Video Slicer - synching up Live’s slicer to Isadora - same technique but a bit of maths to convert the midi notes Live creates to video position. You can make some quite glitchy s***!

AV Slicer Tutorial - Ableton 7 Slicer with Isadora from digital funfair on Vimeo.

Lots more information at Gavin’s site, Boredbrands Digital Funfair.

He needs someone to build the Mac plug-in, so Max users, if you’re game, go for it!

AV Sync Tutorial

AV Slicer Tutorial

Good as this is, I hope we see some audiovisual setups that work with more asynchronous relationships between music and motion — I know my own tastes for my personal work tend in the abstract. Maybe I’ll have to put my money where my mouth is and write it up myself.

Beeple - iv.7 (annoyingly small mix) on Vimeo

Beeple’s Audiovisual exploits have been featured twice on Create Digital Motion, and raised a variety of questions. Momo the Monster cornered Mike Winkelmann in a dark alley and forced him to give us the information you crave.

What can you tell us about your method?

Well, usually I write the basis for a song using loop-based software like FL Studio, then i take and export all of those loops and make video that syncs precisely to each note in the loop. If it’s a melody line, then I will try to make it so that you can discern the different notes that are being played. If it is a more rhythmic or atonal sound,I will try to make some piece of video that “looks” like that sound. Then I render the loops of music and video together into one video file. Next, I take those video files into a NLE (I use Vegas 4, mostly) and attempt to write a large piece using my audio/video loops. I layer all of the pieces of audio/video, and because they are all individually synced, bits of my piece, the end product kind of makes itself in terms of video.

Lighting designers rely on DMX in a similar way that electronic musicians use MIDI; it’s the glue which binds their performance together. Many older (as in age, not experience) VJs I meet have come to live video performance through a profession in lighting. Younger visualists tend to have been attracted to the artform through work or study in film and TV, or a love of electronic music and culture. These people (like myself) may know that DMX exists, but have no real experience with the protocol, or the gear it controls.

So when artificialeyes demoed the VMS system for Peter and I at ByteMeFest in Perth last year, I was struck by how simple this step into the lighting world could be. Todd and Michael were using off-the-shelf VMS projection units and controlling them with a clever little open source USB DMX controller called the uDMX, which includes software to translate midi messages into DMX.

So when it came time to plan for the 2008 album launch tour with Bobby Flynn, my desire to expand the impact of our show (while keeping to an extremely restrictive budget and baggage allowance) put a moving video system right on top of my list of possibilities. In the end we didn’t have the cash to invest in VMS, but taking Peter’s previously tried route of mating an inexpensive Rosco iCue robotic mirror with the projectors we already had in our rig was a simple backup plan. For around AU$1000 each (around $600 in the US), plus a trip to the hardware store, we now have two functional (if currently rather ugly) DMX controllable video moving systems.

As digital musicians have realized for some time, working with computers is all about physical control. It’s the difference between feeling like you’re operating software and playing an instrument. So it’s no accident that Jay Smith is quick to call the Ohm, a new hardware controller for visuals and music, an “instrument.” I got to hang out at the Hoboken, New Jersey office of Livid and play with the Ohm a bit. Hands-on experience is everything: as you can see, you’ve got a nicely-crafted wooden crossfader piece, for starters. Here are some first impressions.

I had the pleasure of participating in this year’s Motion Graphics Festival, and just being there provided enough inspiration for a year’s worth of projects.

I’ve tried to track down and compile some of the highlights that really struck me as being innovative and interesting. The actual environments were so saturated with visual media that it was tough to take it all in, so I’ve also enlisted the help of a few participants/attendees to sort it all out.

The era of the visualist has come to an exciting point. From a relatively fringe activity, we have seen tools and techniques develop quickly over the last couple of years. The idea of a VJ as a performer is steadily gaining more public mind share. Along with this growth, hardware and software concepts from both new and established developers are helping to further expand the possibilities we have for production and performance.

One of the most exciting groups to enter the VJ consciousness recently is Vixid. They’ve been working on their VJ mixer - the VJX16-4 - for several years, and it finally started hitting the market in 2007.

Unlike the other semi-recent entries to the vision mixer market - Numark’s AVM02 and Pioneer’s Big Expensive Thing - the VJX16-4 isn’t just an incremental upgrade to the basic task of "mixing between two sources of video". Vixid have designed it from the ground up to be a considerably more advanced way of working with live video.

Fortunately, Michael and Todd of artificialeyes were available to guide us through this exciting and slightly confusing new world. We shot many hours of video with the ae guys at ByteMe Festival last December, including plenty of time with the VJX. First up: An intro and overview to this superb piece of kit. The video runs for 10:30. Considerably longer than we’d intended to make these CDMtv videos, however we believe the Vixid is such an important and potentially influential piece of hardware - and such a big investment - that you’d want to get more detailed information rather than a superficial overview. For those who are impatient or feeling texty I’ll follow up the video with some of my first impressions and thoughts.

Where better than the self-proclaimed most isolated city on Earth to talk about the state — and future — of VJing? The Byte Me Festival in Perth, Australia brought a rare convergence of digitalists and visualists in December. We cornered a variety of individuals at the open-jam Plug ‘n Play, from lay persons to internationally-touring artists, to chat about their work and the live visual scene in general.

My personal favorite interview of the night was Solu, the Finnish-born, Barcelona-based audiovisual artist. Solu’s meditative A/V set, with softly-echoing deconstructed wartime imagery, was one of the highlights of the evening. She stopped to talk to us about:

“In this scene, women are missing … even though in workshops, there are 50/50 women and men. I think we need more women here, definitely, for many reasons.”

• what to call what she’s doing (”live visualist”? “video processor”?)
• how she got into visualism
• how women respond to her work (the “dream world” description I thought was apt)
• where all the women have gone
• why VJs should be paid fairly, and their art respected more — not just as a means of selling bottles of booze
• why 2008 will be the best year ever.

Sounds like a platform for global VJ President. Got my vote.

Incidentally, since someone asked in comments on another story, her three tools of choice were, in order, Max/MSP/Jitter, Isadora, Modul8. Max/Jitter was the software of the evening, for sound and visuals.

In case you missed it the first time, our informally-edited footage of Plug ‘n Play is mostly Solu for the second half. Seeing her live is best, though, so keep your eyes peeled, especially if you’re lucky enough to live in Barcelona.

Plug N Play - ByteMe Festival - Perth from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

Byte Me: Open Jamming for Visualists at Plug and Play, Perth

Solu’s artist site

DJs are spoiled for choice when it comes to melding vinyl turntablism skills with digital mixing. But visualists have had no real mature option. Serato’s VIDEO-SL plug-in promises to change that, when coupled with their Scratch LIVE software and the Rane TTM-57SL mixer. To give the results a real shakedown, we turned to dj rndm and Robotkid, an audio-visual duo out of Boston who had already been frustrated with existing alternatives. Is the VIDEO-SL the breakthrough product visualists have waited for? -PK

Scratch LIVE v1.8 and Video-SL 1.0 boast the ability to not only mix video alongside your digital audio tracks but to give it groundbreaking control via Rane’s TTM-57SL mixer (required). After several anxious months of anticipation, we recently got our hands on the fader of Rane’s newest DJ gear to see how well it lived up to the demo shown at last year’s NAMM event. This progression of audio/ video integration seemed too good to be true, especially for those of us wrangling with the likes of Virtual DJ and Ms. Pinky. 

When the Video-SL plugin ran for the first time, we knew there was no going back.

Video demos

dj rndm takes the full VIDEO-SL setup for a spin, mixing:

… and scratching:

Effects, transitions

The Video-SL interface blends seamlessly into the Scratch LIVE window and functions with the same ease and readability known from previous iterations. The plugin includes over two dozen video effects and sixteen different transitions to layer and transform your video content in real-time. Most of the effects and transitions are fairly standard. While Serato has no immediate plans to allow for user-custom transitions and effects, they did tell us that adding new ones is relatively easy, and they say they hope to add new content based on feedback from the Scratch LIVE forums.

After my last slow motion tests with my Sony HVR-V1P, CDMo reader FANF gave me some quick tips on how to run a resolution test.

Now here is a little protocol for definition testing: Get his first: http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/~westin/misc/ISO_12233-reschart.pdf
Print it 350 dpi min, 600 recommended.

Place it in a well lit spot, in the sun for example, fixed to the wall. Use a spirit level. Place your camera with the optical axis perpendicular to the plane of the testchart (measure hight, use spirit level).
You should not see the white triangles on the underscanned image. No white triangle pointing into the image, the black triangles should ideally be pointing to the perfect edge of the screen.

To test the resolution/definition on the full breadth of the lens, do a test at wide angle, mid, and full tele, placing camera/testchart at the right distance for the scale to be right.
It would be equally important to test each focal at iris values 1.6, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11 to have a good idea of how definition rises and falls when you stop down.
To do this, use the “aperture prioriy” or “Av” program mode on your camera for correct exposure.

The definition of your camera, horizontal & vertical being distinct, is read by following the lines along the higher numbers ; the number where you cannot distinguish them from one another is your definition, in n x 100 lines. (Make sure you zoom into digitalised footage to measure the image, and not your screen !)

Now I have to admit that I didn’t quite go through with all of the different angles and apertures, and I’m not entirely certain that the resolution chart was printed to the correct size, but it doesn’t matter, as the difference between different shooting modes is obvious, even without meticulous shooting and calibration.

The images created by this process are reasonably large (1920×1080 to be precise), so I’m going to offer some small crops to discuss, and then offer up the full size images for download and examination at the end of the piece, if the mood takes you.

First up, a couple of 1:1 crops taken from the uncompressed HDMI output of the camera. This is with no HDV compression, so apart from JPG compression for the web these are the pixels as seen by the sensor. Obviously the lighting is a little low, but you can see that the resolution goes down to around 800 lines before it starts getting difficult to distinguish. All of the numbers and markings are easy to distinguish, and there aren’t any hugely obvious compression artifacts.