UK touring visualist Deepvisual (who is currently kicking around the UK with The Orb) has posted a 3-minute overview into his touring rig.

There’s a lot of great tips packed in to 3 minutes of video, so pay attention. I wish someone had told me “take some chocks along to help angle your projectors” before I wasted countless hours over the last year searching around various venues for scraps of wood.

As a visualist I have an incessant appetite for gear. The inaugural Plug N Play Brisbane on Tuesday reminded me that it doesn’t have to be this way, however. While I rocked up with bags and boxes of computers, cables, cameras, controllers and hardware, others arrived with a single laptop, and of course were able to put equally compelling material on the screen. Or, to be perfectly honest - more-compelling material, as I struggled to remember which icons were required to get 3L’s automation chains working.

Debilitating addictions aside; everyone present was interested in my source for cheap security cameras, BNC converters, HDMI cables and other necessary items, so I’m guessing that the rest of the community may also enjoy: DealExtreme (disclosure: Affiliate links used, if you buy stuff I get a cut).

DealExtreme has a huge range of, basically, ephemera: iPod batteries, LED torches, cable converters, chargers… The type of things you’d get for $20 in a local shop, or you could find on eBay for $2 plus $15 shipping. DealExtreme matches those deceptively cheap eBay prices, and then proceeds to not charge shipping, which puts everything into the category entitled “Ridiculously Cheap Stuff”.

The range is large and varied. This coupled with a not particularly intuitive search and categorization of the site has resulted in me wasting many hours paging through, but along the way I’ve bookmarked plenty of things which may be useful to the average VJ:

No matter how committed you are to some of the alternatives, Google’s YouTube will remain part of your online life. So we continue our look at how to make it more livable.

Readers wrote in with some tips and impressions of YouTube’s new "higher-quality video" mode:

Make Your YouTube More Livable: I Have a Fast Connection Setting

Richard Lainhart, a regular on Create Digital Music (attention, Buchla modular fans!), had some specific tips on which upload settings to use and how to force high-quality playback:

Gavin Morris has been working on an audiovisual setup with Ableton Live and Isadora, a tasty combination for any Windows or Mac user. Isadora, for those of you who don’t know, is a visually-focused modular patching tool. It’s similar to tools like Max/MSP/Jitter, but by emphasizing the practical needs of visual performance, it’s unusually usable when putting together real-world gigs. Its use by A/V dance troupe Troika Ranch (co-founder Mark Coniglio is also the tool’s creator) has also popularized it in modern dance circles.

Gavin has two tutorials for us to start. The first syncs up Live and Isadora, along the lines we ran here using Live by momo the monster:

AV Cutup Secrets: Using Lucifer & Live

Gavin writes:

It’s similar to Momo’s recent Tutorial but uses a free tool for the VST (Pluggo) and allows control from the Live interface (as opposed to within the VST) This allows you a lot more flexibility and means you can use Follow Actions, adjust loop lengths/positions in realtime and even create a slicer. It is Live>Isadora via OSC but could equally be to many other softwares and could equally use MIDI.

I’ve written a VST to go in slicer channels tool.

Sync Ableton Live to Isadora using a Pluggo VST from digital funfair on Vimeo.

Gavin warns us that the video may "put us off." At first I thought that meant it was NSFW or something, but … well, that’s not the problem. You’ll see. I leave it up to you to decide how you feel about it.

The second tutorial gives you the power of Emergency Broadcast Network-style A/V slicing:

I’ve done a tutorial for a Video Slicer - synching up Live’s slicer to Isadora - same technique but a bit of maths to convert the midi notes Live creates to video position. You can make some quite glitchy s***!

AV Slicer Tutorial - Ableton 7 Slicer with Isadora from digital funfair on Vimeo.

Lots more information at Gavin’s site, Boredbrands Digital Funfair.

He needs someone to build the Mac plug-in, so Max users, if you’re game, go for it!

AV Sync Tutorial

AV Slicer Tutorial

Good as this is, I hope we see some audiovisual setups that work with more asynchronous relationships between music and motion — I know my own tastes for my personal work tend in the abstract. Maybe I’ll have to put my money where my mouth is and write it up myself.

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.

We really prefer Vimeo.com around here, but that doesn’t stop people from uploading video to YouTube — meaning you have to live with the results.

You can make YouTube slightly less painful, however. Old news — the setting popped up a few weeks ago — but if you’re like me and haven’t changed your settings yet, now’s the time. Here’s how:

You’ll need to be logged in. Go to Account > Account (the header on your My Account Page) > Video Playback Quality and choose “I have a fast connection.” You don’t need a terribly fast connection, because the upshot of all of this is that you bump up to 480×360. (Yeah, I know — be still my beating heart. Vimeo, Blip, and others already have HD, and YouTube has 480×360.)

Oh, and it gets worse: not all videos have been converted to the new format.

And worse still: the content uploader apparently has no control over this whatsoever.

Did I mention how much I hate YouTube? Still, it’s worth the 30 seconds it takes to change the setting.

For more discussion:

Watch Higher Quality YouTube Videos [Wired.com How-to Wiki]

Videohelp Forum Thread

Anyone with uploading tips for taking advantage of this, or how we can lobby Google to give us something that doesn’t suck — just let us know.

Lucifer is a plug-in that does real-time audio slicing and repeats — as in for music. So what is this plug-in, running in Ableton Live as a host (hmm, music again), showing up on Create Digital Motion? Because our friend Momo used its MIDI output capabilities to trigger video — and got an unusual interaction between sound and visual as a result. Now, I’m in the camp that says Ableton Live should stay a music app; there are too many well-developed visual tools that Live would never equal. But this is the exception that proves that point: by thinking in a musical way when triggering visuals, you get a relationship between the two you wouldn’t otherwise. Momo shows us how in the latest VJ Kung Fu tutorial. -PK

If you’re not familiar with Lucifer, it’s a VST/AU plugin for realtime beat-based cutup/repeats of audio. What you’re going to do is route the MIDI from Lucifer out to another program that will do Video cutups. This is useful for more than just video - with the MIDI signals coming out of Lucifer, you can control and trigger and MIDI-capable software and hardware.

We figured out a way to control video using the awesome Lucifer plugin while working on our Karate Kid AV Remix. In response to a few inquiries about just how we made this work, I put together a video tutorial showing how to set up Lucifer to output MIDI.

Karate Kid AV Remix from momo_the_monster on Vimeo.

While this particular implementation is specific to the Lucifer plug-in, it’s a thought-provoking approach to doing AV Cutups. You could build a similar method by creating MIDI clips that output common/useful triggering patterns, and trigger those instead of mashing buttons to directly start your videos.

Also, this method involves looking at the MIDI Sync information coming from Live and using that to figure out a proper loop-length for your video. This way, you can use a longish video by simply adjusting the ‘play start’ point rather than cutting your videos down to 8 or 16 proper-length versions.

Hit VJ Kung Fu for the full article.

If you’ve been intrigued by all this talk of Quartz Composer, the free visual creation software that ships with Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5, here’s your chance to actually learn how to do cool stuff with it. Our friend Momo walks us through a basic tutorial on simple 3D and audio processing, which you could easily apply to more complex ideas. With QC support in the upcoming VDMX5, you could drop this into a VJ set with traditional clips, as well. We’ve got step-by-step instructions, plus a video. Let us know if you create anything wild with this as its basis.

Quartz Composer: Lighting 3D Cubes and Moving them with Audio Input from momo_the_monster on Vimeo.

In this Quartz Composer tutorial, We’re going to make a 3D cube that responds to our voice.

First we start up Quartz Composer. The icon will be different depending on whether you’re running OS X 10.5 or 10.4.

From the File menu, choose New Blank (or simply ‘New’ in Tiger).

Quartz Composer gurus have had to face challenges bringing in network data: the problem is, to keep Quartz Compositions secure, Apple has largely crippled networking features. Celso Martinho has been hacking QC to make networking work in Leopard, and has a functional solution. He wrote us to tip us off on a detailed post at his blog.

First, if you’re still on Tiger, good news:

I needed a way to get data from the Network in the form of events that I could reuse in a quartz composition. So our resident mac programmer coded this custom made patch based on sparse non official documentation found on the internet. And it worked great. We have about 5 plasma screens with mac minis over at work running it for months, no problems whatsoever.

But while Leopard finally offered an official means of making your own patches (that’s what the rest of the patching world calls “objects”, Max/MSP, vvvv, and Pd users), Leopard also breaks their custom patch. Solution?

Then I found 2 patches in the new “Network” category: Network Broadcaster and Network Receiver. They are meant to connect several qtz compositions across the network and exchange messages between them. But maybe I can use them for something else…

I wrote a quartz composition to broadcast messages using UDP and multicast and started debugging and I discovered that the packets are really simple non-crippled text messages, four bytes per character iso-latin encoded chunks.

If you’re doing heavy-duty networking, I’d still investigate other alternatives to make sure Quartz Composer is your best choice. Processing and Max/MSP/Jitter both make short work of UDP send/receive, thanks to Java’s natural abilities there, as do objects in vvvv, Pd, and the like. Even Flash has some data features, with a little work. On the other hand, QC has some natural tricks of its own, and for multi-machine setups, the combination of this hack with QC’s new multi-computer features is very sweet indeed.

Full details, plus a PHP script that does the dirty work, here:

Leopard’s Quartz Composer and Network events [Celso Martinho]