Our friend MoRpH (whose work you’ve seen previously posted to archive.org and on the intro to our VMS video) was lucky enough to get his hands on an Edirol V8 - sequel to the venerable V4 - and followed it up by being awesome enough to send us this review.

A few years back Roland rocked the VJ world by giving us the first ever VJ specific video mixer, the V4. Over time, other areas such as small AV companies and churches have adopted the wonderfully small and low cost (but full featured) unit as a workhorse in many environments. But taking one look at the unit you can see it was designed for VJs. Now with the release of the V8, Roland is back to up the ante again with a feature set that builds on the success of the V4, without bogging the unit down with hidden features or a large price tag. I was lucky enough to get some hands on time with the first one to touch down in Australia recently, much to my delight.

The most striking things that first hit you about the new V8 have to be the inclusion of 8 inputs (a god send on large multi source rigs) and the change to faders, instead of pots/knobs from the old V4. Clearly on this front Roland have been listening to their users, with the inputs now being BNC plugs on the rear of the unit with individual monitor outs and the faders being excellent quality. You can see that this is an evolution of the V4 design, which often caused problems with the top mounted RCA inputs and the Pots on the FX and White/Black fade needing to be replaced. A very well placed tweak to the White/Black output fade system means that - instead of having to keep the knob centered - we now get 100% signal on the fader all the way up and 100% white or black, selectable on a separate switch, with the fader all the way down.

Also on the fading front, we have individual bus fades, so at the press of a button your FX fader becomes a video level for the channel, which combined with the new Mix modes I’ll cover later makes this a perfect scratch video tool.

We’ve got some additional details on the Edirol V-8 mixer. Pricing will be set at US$1995 list. For comparison, the V-4 lists for US$1029, but has a street price pretty close to that — perhaps due to the unit’s popularity rather than any minimum advertised pricing restrictions.

The V-8 is shipping within a month. I’ll make sure CDMotion is high on the list as far as evaluation units. While I hear the criticisms — and some of you have moved beyond hardware mixing or now rely on high definition signal — there’s very little that can outclass the V-8 for what it is in the same price range. If it delivers, it could easily remove the justification for buying a V-4, even at half the price. Watch for our hands-on report.

Edirol V-8 Mixer [Worldwide product page]

Edirol V-8 Preview on CDMotion (with a little pro-HD trolling, to boot!)

The Edirol V-8 mixer is the big story as far as new VJ gear at Messe, but the P-10 “Visual Presenter” is an interesting piece, too. It’s a video sampler, basically, as was the now-discontinued Korg Kaptivator. The P-10 has a number of advantages over the Kaptivator that could make it a big hit for sampling. First, it’s more compact: you get 12 pads and a tidy control layout in a small space that you could easily pack with a laptop. Second, while Roland hasn’t announced official pricing, we expect it to cost less than the Korg. But most importantly, the P-10 uses a standard video format (MJPEG, or JPEG stills) stored on removable SD media. That means you could shoot video and stills on a portable camera that supports MJPEG and JPEG and drop the card straight into the P-10 — hot stuff.

Basic features:

• MJPEG video, JPEG stills
• Built-in display
• Capture audio and video live via onboard inputs
• 12 triggers, effects dials

Edirol P-10 Product Page [ Worldwide Site]

There’s also V-LINK support and a slide-show function. But for me, sampling + removable MJPEG is the real story. The image we’ve got is a prototype and is expected to change by production time. Price and ship date TBD; stay tuned.

While we wait, I may have to whip up a little applet that automatically loads and catalogs stuff I shoot on my Canon digicam, along the same lines… I can see getting through some paid gigs this way.

The Edirol V-4 has been the standard mixer for years, leaving people desperately wanting a sequel. Korg tried with the KrossFour, but what they came up with was mainly a V-4 wannabe — a welcome DJ-style crossfader couldn’t make up for the lack of differentiating features, and the V-4’s elegant layout. And Edirol’s own HD-resolution V-440HD wasn’t priced for mortals.

The Edirol V-8 promises to change all of that.

First, Edirol has wisely copied the satisfying control layout of the V-4. Hate on the V-4 if you like, but I think we take for granted how cleanly-designed and intuitive that layout is. The V-4 isn’t a perfect mixer by any means, but by encouraging mixing flow, and creating an affordable mixer that worked well for a broad audience, they did create a major hit.

What’s great is that the V-8 adds what the V-4 lacked:

• Computer inputs: two “RGB” inputs with standard D-Sub 15-pin inputs (what most people call VGA jacks, even if that’s not strictly correct); a switcher for selection
• More inputs all around: 7 composite ins, 4 S-Video jacks, for a total of 8 simultaneous input channels (i.e., you can use up to 4x composite and 4x S-Video simultaneously)  … oh, yeah, and BNC jacks
• More outputs: 3 output channels, and monitors for inputs 1-7, channel B (monitoring either S-Video or RGB computer in), and the main preview output jack
• Independent, DJ-style vertical faders instead of those inconvenient V-4 knobs, plus better preset buttons — and an output fader, not a knob (finally!)
• Internal scan converter and time base correction

Live visual instruments often lack that … certain something. Other than occasional oddities like the Livid Viditar, generally visual performance instruments just don’t have the panache of musical instruments. The solution: pack a bunch of hardware into the body of a white-lacquered grand piano, of course! (What, that seemed like a logical leap?)

As seen on our sister site Create Digital Motion:
BabyGrandMaster: DJ/VJ Studio Packed into a Piano

The innards look like someone held a sweepstakes for VJ and DJ gear and then consulted Prince for industrial design tips. (And that’s even before you add the optional pink neon underlighting and fog effects. Seriously.) For visualists:

1. Dual Pioneer DVJ-X1 DVD Players
2. Edirol V-4 Video Mixer
3. [Triple] Marshal LCD Monitors

I suppose this is one answer to Jaymis’ question of what he should use for a gig case. (Come on, someone’s discarded Young Chang may be sitting at the local scrapyard. Pain that sucker, drop in your gear, good to go. Uh, sorta.)

I have just received and unwrapped my shiny new Numark AVM02 mixer. Unfortunately way too late for the 3 gigs I had over the weekend, so it will be a week or so until I have a hands-on, performance review. In the meantime though, I have plenty of first impressions.

It’s shiny. It’s big (19″ rack standard). Build quality is very solid - no surprises there - and all faders, knobs and buttons feel like they’re attached to a professional mixer. The crossfaders are a little slow, needing to be pushed all the way across rather than travelling there with a flick, and the lack of ”transform” buttons rules out some fun mixing tricks which can be performed with the V4, but perhaps this will encourage me to develop better crossfader technique.

It has many inputs and outputs. Ignoring the audio stuff for now (which is so passe darlings) we have 4 S-Video and 4 Composite in (not switchable, not sure how it selects between them). 2 S-Video and 2 Composite out, and 4 composite monitor outs.

Put it next to the V4 and one thing is instantly apparent: You’re getting a lot of mixer for your money.

When Livid introduced software templates for using the Edirol V-4 to control their video software and visa versa, a lot of us wondered why. Now, Livid’s given us a fantastic reason: imagine controlling as many as 8 Edirol V-4 mixers simultaneously, for 32 simultaneous video inputs and 8 outputs (meaning 8 independent screens). Now you’re talking:

Livid octav-4

Thanks to the fact that Edirol implemented rich MIDI control schemes on their mixer, you can make all the magic happen from your laptop. The octav-4 software provides a visual representation of 1-8 mixers on your computer, and allows you to “cascade” effects and transitions across all the mixers. You can automatically save presets, sync BPM transitions and fades, and automatically cycle inputs.

This means, of course, two things. First, Livid is proving capable of doing cool things with the V-4 even Roland/Edirol missed. Second, you need to call all your VJ friends right now and wrangle your V-4s together.

US$129, already shipping, and already in action with my NY mates Josh Goldberg and Giles Hendrix with Paul van Dyk @ The Roxy (who have the projectors, evidently).

Computer VJing is about to hit prime time, thanks to gains in computer performance. Mixing 2-channel 640×480 Photo JPEG-compressed video is finally possible — no more 320×240x15 jaggies. One of the tools I’m most excited about is the new Edirol hardware/software package, and I got to try it out at AES.