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.

Deepvisual has posted a second Vixid demo video to VJForums, showing off the layer arrangement functions, preview selection, and blend mode layering:

There is currently a VJX16-4 with my name on the box, en-route between France and Australia. It should be arriving in the next couple of days - just in time for a run of shows at Sydney’s The Basement - so expect plenty of Vixid news, reviews and tips to come.

Previously: Blend Modes, Keying and More: Vixid Function Demo Video from Deepvisual.

Deepvisual have posted a 3 minute look at some of the VJX16-4’s functions on VJForums.

More tutorials on a variety of gear can be found on their website.

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.

After twenty years or so of music software, you’ll often find that what you need to do is creatively satisfied by what’s available in pre-built tools. But video is often another matter: even if a VJ tool does what you need some of the time, there are times when you need something that doesn’t exist (or even something simpler, to perform a specific task). You might not be ready to invest hundreds of dollars in Max/MSP/Jitter to do that, of course. Enter Pure Data, Max’s free, open-source cousin. Like Max, it lets you quickly build custom tools by visually “patching” objects on-screen — ideal for modular video tools. But unlike Max, it costs nothing, it runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and because of the rich Pd community and a good relationship with the Max community, it has some tricks of its own.

Beau, aka DJCypod, writes to share his excellent video tutorial on building a simple 2-way mixer in Pd. Beau, if you ever need a second career, I think you could do relaxation recordings; I felt my blood pressure dropping. Next time I have students getting nervous about Pd or patching, I’m sending them to this video. (Well, and also because it’s really easy to follow.)

Totally beginner-friendly, so newbies will get rolling fast. And as a long-time Max user, it served as a nice introduction for me, too.

Pure Data Video Mixer: YouTube, Internet Archive

You’ll also need the Pd Extended Release; see our previous story

I’ll be building some Pd software mixers this month, so I’ll be sure to report back! (Any requests, or tips from those of you who know Pd better than I do?) Now, if only I could easily integrate Processing with Pd, as you can with Max. (At least Pd does have Java support of its own.)

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).

DVCreators has put up a half an hour tutorial on Quartz Composer detailing how they have created their introduction graphics:

I’ve always liked the super-dramatic light rays effect, but the light rays filters in Motion and Final Cut Pro take too long to render… and frankly, they are pretty lame. So I’ve been waiting for the right opportunity to help you create those super long, awesome godlike light rays, and preferably in real time! And finally, that opportunity is here.

So if you have some time to burn and have been putting off digging in to one of the nicest DIY visuals environments, head on over to DVCreators.net and get your learn on.

John Hutchinson pointed us to this hack a day post about a new projector calibration system. Skip to minute 3:00 in the video to see the applications for multiple projections and non-rectangular, curved surfaces. It uses embedded light sensors in the projection surface and software — no projector hacks — and was created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon (pdf), Stanford, and Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs. Not only could this be a huge timesaver for groups like the Circus of Now, the time saved could be used to get really ambitious and experimental with your projection design.

Ed. Thanks to John Hutchinson for the tip!