Meetings

NWAV Meeting 0001 Recap

The first meeting of NWAV took place on Tuesday, September 2nd in the MacForce theater in SE Portland. The meeting had two main parts: Screening of Works and Demonstrations.

This section was designed to give a brief introduction to audiovisual performance, with the understanding that many people attending were hearing about it for the first time. While it does provide some historical background, it heavily features my own works and favorites, as those are the pieces I can best explain.

Youtube Playlist :: Skip to any Video
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=B5322CF66A6290CF

Full listing of screened works:

War Photographer

Music video by Joel Trussel

Rock This Base

AV Cutup by EBN

Timber

AV Cutup by Coldcut + Hexstatic

Century Gothic

Instrumental Video by Beeple

Live Excerpts from WDCH

Cornelius playing w/DVD + lights

Come on My Selector

Music video by Chris Cunningham

Argon

AV Performance by Chiral + Momo the Monster

SwoopSwiffer

AV Cutup by TV Sheriff

Playsonic

AV Instrument by Momo the Monster

On the Cross-Stick

AV Remix by NorthernMonkey

Mac vs PC

AV Remix by Momo the Monster

Magnetic Ink

Audioreactive Processing by Flight404

Stranger

AV Performance Tech by Eboman

Interstellar Sugar

AV Piece by Suryummy (not included in above YouTube playlist)

Amateur

AV Piece by Lasse Gjertsen

Ho-lee-Cow

AV Work-In-Progress by Momo the Monster

Shatner Woo

AV Remix by Josh Pearson or Greg Deocampo of EBN

 

 

Please let me know if you have better title or creator information for the above videos.

After the screenings, we took a ten minute break for some personal q&a, socializing, and hands-on time with the Crop Circles AV Instrument (article and source code forthcoming).

A brief and overly-simplified look at what people use to control live video.

There are basically two kinds of VJ Software. There are what I’ll call ‘Ready-Made Mixers’, like the following programs:

Screenshots of VDMX, Modul8, Resolume, Union, Grand VJ, Flowmotion, AVMixer Lite and Onyx.

They share a very similar paradigm at heart, even though their feature sets and styles vary wildly. The underlying standards are a media library whose contents you can play on multiple layers, manipulating and blending them live. Most programs provide effects you can add to layers, and external control via MIDI devices. Finally, they allow you to see the interface, including previews of your layers, while displaying your final output through to a second video output - connected to a projector, television, monitor, etc. They range in price from free to hundreds of dollars, and they’re all put out by very small software companies serving a (currently) niche market.

The other sort of VJ Program is what I’ll call the Roll-Your-Own. Some program in this category are:

Screenshots of Quartz Composer, vvvv, Isadora and Max/MSP.

These programs are geared towards creating realtime video projections, as the others are, but you decide just how you want it all to function. They’re easier than programming your own native VJ application, but their initial learning curve can be quite steep.

So what to do if you’re just a beginner VJ and you want to know what software to pick? As I mentioned, it’s much more complicated than just ready-made or roll-your own. Modul8 users create their own ‘Modules’ and share them online, VDMX allows you to build your own interface, Quartz Composer can actually be used inside other programs, etc. My recommendation is to download demos for every available program, and spend some quality time with each - go through the ‘getting started’ guides, and try mixing videos to your favorite music.

Jumping head-first into Quartz Composer to make cool things happen, plus a 5 minute Q+A. Basically a live version of this Quartz Composer Tutorial at VJ Kung Fu.

http://www.vimeo.com/416956

An example of using Isadora and Ableton Live to sample and cutup live video, plus a 5 minute Q+A. Full article forthcoming - here’s a home test for now:

http://www.vimeo.com/1733438

An Overview of the NuVJ bundle for beginners, plus a 3 minute Q+A. Similar to the NuVJ Crash Course Tutorial at VJ Kung Fu.

A very quick intro to this advanced VJ Software, which was used to mix and present all the videos in Part I. No video, sorry - you’ll have to wait for the in-depth article.

Thanks to everyone who came out to the meeting, see you next time!

© 2008 NWAV :: Northwest Audiovisualists.