American director Todd M Duym has put together a tight little multi-camera music video for Curtis Santiago.

Curtis Santiago - Annabel from Todd M Duym on Vimeo.

The edit is loads of fun. Having worked on a much simpler screen-splitting post production before, I can imagine the post on this piece may have been reasonably time-consuming. Expressions and scripting and a well organized workflow can help make this kind of thing easier, but when it comes down to it you’re moving a lot of little bits of data around.

Cheap video cameras are doing such fun things for music video.

Speaking of extra heads, I recently completed a music video - Fail With Me - with collaborator Edward Guglielmino, for the album Late At Night.

Edward Guglielmino - Fail With Me from Jaymis on Vimeo.

A continuation of the Quick, Single-Shot philosophy I espoused and we discussed 6 months ago.

I think this integration is where the future of the music industry lies. Previously the model was to save up money and art, to take it somewhere secret for a long time, then eventually release a monolithic product - an album or a live show - and hope people identify with that. I feel the future of music and video is smaller, incremental works. Gathering fans steadily, through free, easily accessible releases in whatever media and networks are available, rather than holding out for the giant fanfare of an album or tour, which has a single shot at success.

Which is why I shot the Bridge Sessions with Edward Guglielmino. We spent a couple of hours - considerably less time than I wasted last year discussing CD packaging options or album revenue shares, and created something which lets people identify what we’re doing, to become fans, and to join our journey as artists. Because it’s a piece of art, some people will love it, some will think it’s boring, or terrible. If it was an album we’d spent a year making, those latter reactions would be a tragedy, but we only spent a couple of hours, which means we have another chance to turn those people into fans next week.

Since then we have released another 5 videos. 4 of which were documenting live performance, and this one a “studio” piece, for the studio album.

I’ve had my VJX16-4 for around 6 months now. It’s no secret that I think it’s an amazing piece of kit, but it’s a tribute to the vision of those crazy Frenchies that every time I think I’m ready to review the thing, I discover something else exciting and have to spend another couple of weeks exploring the new techniques and possibilities made available to me.

Vixid Advanced: Keying and Titling Transparency with Channel Masks from Create Digital Media on Vimeo. Music by Edward Guglielmino.

The above video shows some advanced uses of “Channel Mask” keying. The VJX’s keyer functions allow you to select any of the 4 tracks as a “Key Layer” for Colour-, Chroma- or Lumakeying. Additionally, there are “RGB Mask” functions, which use the Red, Green or Blue channel of a selected layer as an alpha mask for the keyed layer. This allows you to use one layer to individually mask the other three layers, or do titling with detailed transparency as displayed above.

As far as I’m aware, no other mixer has this RGB Mask capability. It’s a deceptively simple thing, but once you spend some time experimenting with it, an ocean of possibilities flood your skull, and you need to go for a quiet lie down somewhere.

I have a project launching soon which uses this technique to pretty exciting effect. In the meantime there’s more technical information at Vixid.Noisepages.

Some smooth, stretchy After Effects work mixed with spot-on sound design gives us Tales of the Unexpected, by More Soon.

Tales of the Unexpected from More Soon on Vimeo.

Here’s the only clue so far on the techniques used:

Yeah pretty much.. it’s a really long video made in After Effects layered over a series of displacements.

I’ll try to get some more secrets out of the creator, but in the meantime: Any CDM readers like to step up on how this might have been created?

This is my favorite part of video production, the “figuring out someone else’s Kung Fu” process, but I don’t know enough about displacement maps to even get started on this one.

Peter and I have been having a serious love-in with Sony’s Vegas Video editing software this year. I’m a long-time Premiere user, but it hasn’t been getting a look in since I realised just how much faster it is for me to edit video with Vegas. I’ve had my eyes opened to the flow. Vegas lets you make edits, rearrange, delete, fade, and layer clips without interrupting playback. As a VJ, of course I’m used to “editing live”, so when I tried to go back to the play-stop-edit-play workflow of Premiere, it felt completely unnatural and archaic.

The one thing I’ve been missing is the tight integration between Premiere and After Effects. Vegas has some reasonably capable post-production tools, but as soon as things got beyond simple colour-correction or pan and scan, I would reach for After Effects, and things would get messy - exporting uncompressed AVIs, multi-layer exports… Unpleasant for everyone involved.

So, Peter and I were counting the ways we love Vegas, and I remarked that “if Vegas could save a file which could be imported in to AFX for post-production - absolute bliss”. I quickly followed this up with “it’s never going to happen”, and started to theorize about converting Vegas project files into XML to be then hacked into Premiere, while clicking around Vegas in a hopeful manner.