OMIRI com VIXID from mspinky23 on Vimeo. (Warning: Contains some NSFW imagery. Jaymis.)

CDM’s Jaymis has just gotten his Vixid VJX16-4 mixer, but we continue getting other hands-on reports from VJs. This one comes from Tiago Pereira, who’s posted a video of him having some healthy play time. Thanks, Tiago — looks like you’re having a blast. Keep them coming, with this or your other favorite gear.

Deepvisual has posted a second Vixid demo video to VJForums, showing off the layer arrangement functions, preview selection, and blend mode layering:

There is currently a VJX16-4 with my name on the box, en-route between France and Australia. It should be arriving in the next couple of days - just in time for a run of shows at Sydney’s The Basement - so expect plenty of Vixid news, reviews and tips to come.

Previously: Blend Modes, Keying and More: Vixid Function Demo Video from Deepvisual.

Deepvisual have posted a 3 minute look at some of the VJX16-4’s functions on VJForums.

More tutorials on a variety of gear can be found on their website.

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.

I’m not sure why we didn’t mention it here while it was “current”, but we did talk about Radiohead’s recent webcast of their album In Rainbows on CDMusic. Even if you’re not in to Radiohead it’s worth watching, as it brings a beautifully varied, personal, low-budget aesthetic to one of the biggest bankers in modern music, it completely changed how I identify with the album. As mentioned in the CDMusic comments, I’m historically a huge Radiohead fan, but have found myself drifting away from their music over the last couple of albums. I paid money for In Rainbows (even though I didn’t have to), listened to it once or twice and then forgot about it, but the Scotch Mist videos made me re-examine the entire album, and it finally clicked for me.

All of this preamble is by way of introducing Adam Buxton, a British filmmaker who says he “helped out” on the webcast, but is billed #2 in the introductory credits to the piece, so it seems he was doing a little more than making coffee.