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.

I talked a bit last month about my woes trying to use a Rosco iCue “intelligent mirror.” The short version: skip the lighting board and the lighting op / designer, and do what Jamie Jewett suggests here, via comments:

I am also using a hacked I-cue with projection and am quite happy with it -

for folks interested in DMX you might also look into the LANbox products - depending on what product you get you can send it DMX, MIDI, USB, ethernet as well as digital and analog sensor data - it’s pretty sweet - it also comes with a piece of free (download-able) software which functions as a light desk on your laptop…

It also has preprogrammed objects for connecting directly to both the Max/MSP/Jitter world (which I am using) and to Isadora (which I have used and would recommend highly - the learning cure is no where near as steep as with jitter…)

my main issue with the I-cue has to do with the difference between the x and y range and the transation between the ‘Cartesian’ world of my 2d desktop and the quasi 3d/polar world of the I-cue - I am finding moving video in a straight line to be quite a pain in the back side…

but between the I-cue and the Lanbox there has been no issues at all…

Sounds like someone needs to build a patch that translates to the iCue … maybe even via joystick input.

Working on digital visuals for choreographer Grisha Coleman’s echo::system, I got to try some new techniques for running visuals. These were necessary experiments, so naturally we had some things that worked well, and some that didn’t. (For more on the piece, see the project site; warning: auto-playing audio via Flash!)

Two particular pieces of gear involved re-purposing lighting equipment for projection use. At the suggestion of video advisor Maya Ciarrocchi, we used Rosco iCue “intelligent mirrors” for positioning the projections. And because we had easy access to the equipment, we used color scrollers in place of dowsers for darkening projectors.

Now having spent some time with each piece of gear, and having gotten some mixed results, I’m happy to share my experience.