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).

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.

Down with laptops! Jaymis and I have both taken up SFF PCs as live tools, so we can bring some serious iron to gigs with multiple video outputs. Now, the only problem: laptops have these handy QWERTY keyboards attached. SFF PCs (and Mac minis and such) mean bringing your own keyboard and display.

I’ve been looking for the perfect keyboard to turn this into an advantage: why not a super-savvy QWERTY keyboard that’s a performance instrument in its own right? I think I’ve found it:

CES 2007: Luxeed Interactive Keyboard [Chip Chick]

Each key can be programmed with colors, interactively, to demarcate areas or individual keys. That should allow color feedback for keyboard shortcuts for your favorite programs (hello After Effects, Final Cut, etc.), but could also be programmed to make it easier to trigger video clips and effects using the keyboard in a performance. And responsive, live music skins could let you “pimp my VJ rig” to add a little bling to your next gig.

Most important for an SFF rig is having a basic mouse capability built into the keyboard; it looks like this keyboard (like many multimedia keyboards) sports cursor capabilities via a controller at the bottom right.

The Korean maker Luxeed hasn’t said anything yet about pricing or availability. Even if it doesn’t show up here in the US, maybe I can pick one up on my next Asian romp.

Any other tips for good QWERTY keyboards for live rigs? Must-have: some kind of mouse function. Nice to have: wireless, lighting.

Dan of Dansdata has recently started a more personal blog. Whereas Dansdata is generally quite focussed on niche tech gadgetry reviews and solving reader problems, his new blog “How To Spot A Psychopath” (named after this page) is a little less focussed, running the gamut from reviews of spam emails, to using lego for casting metal, to the release of Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather miniseries in the UK, and more recently: Light bulb diffraction.

This is important information for visualists, as the colour rendering of the lighting you use effects the quality of your final image. If your bulbs have a low CRI (Colour Rendering Index), then the colours in the images captured by your camera won’t be true to life.

Dan has tested a range of bulbs, and while the results are widely known - halogen and LED are ok, flourescent makes people look like corpses - it’s interesting to see images of why some lamps are such a great choice for zombie movies.