Packing up VJ Gear to fit on an airplane can be tricky business. I flew from Portland to San Diego in order to join the Xochi Media crew for Coachella this year - luckily, they’re supplying most of the heavy equipment, so I needed only the essentials, as photographed above. Here’s what I brought and why:

• Edirol V-4 Video Mixer: The ever-present 4-input, 2-channel mixer which broke the price barrier for amateur VJs and became the staple mixer for many live video perfomers.
• Canon HF100: This is mostly for documentation. I sold my trusty GL-1 last year for this super-compact High-ish Def Camcorder.
• Monome 128: This minimalist, handmade interface is my main controller for VDMX. My Four-Layer setup maps beautifully onto the 16-button-wide box, and the bidirectional communication allows me to see what clips are playing at a glance. Additionally, the second-to-last row of buttons emulates a MIDI keyboard, allowing me to use all my keyboard-reactive animations without the need for the keys. The case was handmade here in Oregon by mapmap
• Cavalry 500GB eSata Drive: This is my dedicated content drive, running at 7200RPM and sending its zeroes and ones over eSata through my ExpressCard slot for faster-than-firewire performance. It may, however, soon give way to an SSD…
• 7″ LCD: This is a little touchscreen marketed for use in cars, purchased from a Chinese importer for around $130. The color on it is better than my old 5″ Gamecube monitor, but it’s forever stuck in a 16:9 ratio, stretching all my 4:3 content to fit. It acts as the preview monitor for my V-4.
• Korg NanoKontrol: Just the right amount of faders and knobs to control my VDMX setup. This replaces my UC-33 which was a bit overkill most of the time.
• Mesh bag full of cables and adaptors: while the Xochi Media crew will be providing the bulk of the cables, I bring enough USB, Firewire and Power Cables to patch my own stuff. Also important are DVI-to-VGA and DVI-to-Composite adaptors to get video signals out of my first-gen MacBook Pro, a 4-Port Powered USB Hub, my Logitech Gamepad, and a small bus-powered Firewire drive in case something happens to my eSata.
• Stanton Uberstand (not pictured): This foldable laptop stand is a tremendous help in conserving precious table space, and it folds flat into its own carrying case. Minus points for needing a velcro cable-tie to keep it from collapsing
• MacBook Pro (not pictured): The heart of my VJ setup, my now-slightly-aging First-Gen MacBook Pro kicks out the pixels with the help of Vidvox’s VDMX5, which I use as a 4-Layer Video Mixer, and a healthy dose of Quartz Composer for interactive visuals.

Everything goes inside of a case for protection, and then I put towels and sweatshirts in the case to keep things from moving around. I actually was slightly over the 50lb weight limit this time around, had to take out my camera at the baggage check counter and stuff it in my carry-on. But the equipment arrived safe and sound, and that’s enough to make me happy after the joys of my inaugural flight with this case:

I’ll be writing updates about Coachella throughout the next week and a half as we prep and rehearse - check it out: Momo the Monster’s Coachella VJ Diary.

Musician Christopher Willits has an ongoing series for XLR8R Magazine in which he talks his own technical workflow. In the latest episode, he adds live visuals to his Ableton Live set using Max/MSP/Jitter. What’s nice about this is you see how some clever mapping can make visuals integrate neatly with music.

I’m somewhat insane, so my own setup often involves simultaneously running visuals separately with no communication with my music software. That allows me to set up less-direct relationships between visuals and sound.

But, while the techniques could be combined to a variety of setups, this also serves as a nice introduction to how you might use patching in Jitter alongside your music software.

Curious to know what you think of the presentation and content here, as I hope we’ll do more videos like this ourselves.

What You Talkin’ Bout, Willits? Part 10 [XLR8R]

Add Max patch effects to DNA. from Livid Instruments on Vimeo.

Yesterday, we saw some splashy video distortion techniques applied to real-time video. You know what that means: it’s time to use these in live performance.

Liquidify Video, Live: Optical Flow GLSL Datamosh Technique

Here’s one start.Peter Nyboer, Max whiz and Livid developer, has run with the idea of squishing around video using optical flow analysis, and shows you how to add the effect to Livid’s Cell DNA VJ app. For Jitter users, this means you can rely on Cell for quick access to video taps and files, while adding unusual effects built in Jitter to get your custom processing on, not only with this example but any other patches you’ve created. One little detail of Cell DNA I missed – it requires Max 4 patches, not Max 5 patches. Peter has also posted a tutorial for working with that, after the jump.

And yes, if none of this is really making sense to you, you can go download the files and just try it out – no need to fully grasp all of the internals straight away.

Don’t want to use Jitter and/or Cell? The guts of Andrew Benson’s video datasplooshing technique is an OpenGL (GLSL) shader, so it doesn’t even rely on Jitter – Jitter can just be a convenient environment for playing around with such things. There’s word we may see a Quartz Composer wrapper around this shader, which would make it easy to use with software like VDMX.

Oh, by the way, I’m officially rescinding my editorial ban on the term “datamoshing.” Why? Because it means absolutely nothing, and therefore can be declared reasonably harmless. Also, unlike the term “glitch,” it comes without any baggage. We therefore have a nice, nonsense term for making video all mushy and unpredictable – a good thing.

The folks at Resolume have been hard at work on a big update to the final 3.0 build just released. Bart says he just uploaded this to the server. Now, so far we’ve found the final build to be quite stable, so if you tried the crash-happy beta builds like the early adopter we know you are, now’s the time to revisit this.  Audiovisual recording is also working properly in 3.01, which looks to be a whole lot of fun. Saturday night I watched Devin aka mzo do an elaborate set mashing up the likes of Garbage Pail Kids: The Movie, in front of a room packed with the world’s top game developers. Resolume was rock-solid and performed beautifully throughout.

Here’s 3.01:

Resolume Download Page

This micro update fixes bugs, improves stability and handles corrupt video files better. Recording is fixed once and for all and it now records both audio and video! In the preferences you can enable and disable audio and video recording. We’ve had a lot of fun creating AV samples with the new recording and we hope you’ll enjoy it too.

Fixed Bugs
#540 [fixed] Record 0 bytes
#537 [fixed] Some audio files are distorted when playing backwards
#560 [fixed] Decks in wrong order
#551 [fixed] PC: Keystone and AddSubtract missing
#578 [fixed] HardLight mixer does not work
#543 [fixed] Wipe Down does not wipe all the way
#580 [fixed] OSX: Live input does not always work
#559 [fixed] Compositions list does not show the last item
#561 [fixed] Continue playback is not working with Audio clips
#557 [fixed] White txt on layer blend mode buttons
#562 [fixed] Audio Input channels are not saved correctly
#534 [fixed] BPM 120.50 not possible
#550 [fixed] Some Application Key Map "Deck" Keystrokes not working
#542 [fixed] Beatloopr doesn’t work until swithed to bpm or beats mode (aarrghh)
#545 [fixed] Speed of videoclip isn’t saved
#581 [fixed] Can’t change directory for ffgl & vst directories

Let us know what you think!

Music lovers now have Max for Live coming later this year. But how about running custom visual patches inside your VJ app? That’s now possible using your own Jitter patches inside Cell DNA, Livid’s new, lightweight live visual tool.

Livid has released a “DevKit” with some example patches and documentation to get you rolling if you’re a Jitter user. Of course, if you’re a hardcore Jitter user, you may be happier just to build your own app anyway, but if you want to access some effects conveniently, this could be quite nice.

And once an app is opened in this way, all kinds of new things are possible:

Your patch could be a processor of video. It can use shaders. It could be an audio player - just latch the DNA knob to the volume! It could be a video synthesizer that completely ignores any of DNA’s video sources. It could even be an automator that just sends messages to various components of DNA (check the Network.pat in the Extras folder for an example of how to use messages to control DNA). The possibilities are endless, really.

DNA DevKit, via Cycling ‘74 forums

Cell isn’t alone. Off the top of my head, some other possibilities for adding custom effects, filters, and other powerful options include:

• FreeFrameGL support in Resolume Avenue 3, VJAMM, Salvation for custom OpenGL-accelerated effects
• 2D/CPU-bound FreeFrame effects in Isadora, ArKaos, vvvv, Modul8
• Quartz Composer patch support in VDMX

The FreeFrame stuff is especially promising, as it could become a real standard format that works across tools.

I expect I’m forgetting about some other options. Which functionality do you use?

Previously:
Livid Cell DNA: Simple, Networkable, Multi-Headed VJ App, And Spiritual Successor to Grid?