New VDMX Update With Improved Chroma Mask, Audio Analysis Visualizations and More!

Hey everyone!

We've released an update that includes a bunch of new features and other improvements – watch the video and read below to get the highlights on what's new!

If you want to jump right in, here's the download link: Download VDMX


Audio Analysis FFT and Waveform Values Published as Video

Using the FFT Color Lines generator to visualize the audio frequency spectrum and raw waveform

When an Audio Analysis plugin is active two new video streams are published that can be used by generators and FX to create new forms of music visualization.

The FFT and raw audio waveform are provided by the plugin as grayscale video streams that are 1 pixel tall. You can access them anywhere a video input menu is found such as a preview or masking FX.

To get started try using the new example FFT Color Lines and FFT Spectrogram ISF video generators.


New ISF Video FX

Earlier this year we released a new format for making custom generators and FX for VDMX called ISF. For this update we've created a bunch of our own new high end FX using the new format.

New film style "Lens Flare" FX

These are some of our favorites:

  • Updated Chroma Mask.fs, greatly improved color masking (eg. green / blue screen).
  • Color and Film FX: Chroma Desaturation Mask, Color Replacement, Ghosting, Bleach Bypass and Lens Flare.
  • Glitch FX: Collage, Convergence, Slit Scan and Pixel Shifter.
  • Geometry and Distortion FX: Optical Flow Distortion, Side Scroller and Flip, Shake and Shockwave Pulse.

Pro tip: Don't forget that you can also make your own ISF based generators and FX using these as example starting points!


Support for Generic HID Controllers

HID Input Plugin connected to SpaceNavigator

The HID Input Plugin interfaces with game controllers, 3D mice, and other devices that support the Human Interface Device (HID) protocol. Buttons, joysticks and sensors are made available to control UI items in VDMX like any other data-source. These can be a fun alternative to using a MIDI or OSC instruments.


Import / Export Control Surface Templates

Exporting a Control Surface layout to a JSON file

From the inspector panel of the Control Surface plugin you can export the layout and settings as a template file that can be easily imported into other projects or sharing standard layouts with other people.

Use the “Import JSON layout” and “Export JSON layout” buttons in the inspector to respectively load and save the templates.


Custom Movie Recorder Directory Paths

Enable the 'Custom export location?' toggle in the Movie Recorder Options panel

When using the Movie Recorder plugin to capture video and images, an optional custom folder location can now be specified in the inspector panel.

The default location for movie recordings can still be set in the VDMX Preferences – this new setting is an optional override for situations where the videos are further parsed or handled by another application or to make sorting the files easier.


Hope you enjoy these new additions and refinements! As always if you have any problems or suggestions send us a message by choosing “Report Bug” from the Help menu.

Once again, here's the download link: Download VDMX

Have a great weekend!

- Dave & Ray

HERMAN KOLGEN / SEISMIK

Premiered at Mutek Montreal 2 weeks ago, SEISMIK was one from HERMAN KOLGEN we had to get some more details about..

Performance or installation about the vertical layering dislocations

inspired by geodetic phenomenoms, frictionnal slidings, fossil earthquakes and the geologycal modelings, seismik use stress fields to provoque tension between vertical layering dislocations.
using the siesmic data of our planet territories, herman kolgen create, with this new work, nervous stratigraphic audiovisual motifs.


How was it made? Herman Kolgen sent us these images and description of their setup,

We created different app in OpenFrameworks to connect in realtime with the seismik data

and by OSC I control audio+video and my Modular analogue kit
by Syphon the audience can see the net connection and mix with my other clips


If you think this looks cool in your web browser, check the vimeo page for more videos and the Herman Kolgen website for upcoming live shows that might be coming to you later this year!

How to get VDMX stickers!

Hey everyone!

We've just arrived back from Mapping Festival where one of the highlights was getting to see visual artists and VJs of all levels from around the world learning new skills not just from the workshop instructors, but also from each other. Everyone openly shared their experiences and techniques using all kinds of software and hardware tools video production and live performance.

The first box full of VDMX logo stickers!

It was also our first chance hand out our new VDMX logo sticker design. Seeing people excitedly applying them to their laptops, bags, notebooks and other random gear was absolutely humbling.

To share this new vinyl goodness with everyone who couldn't make it to the festival we'd like to announce our new totally free “Stickers for Meetups” exchange program.

The idea is easy:

  1. Organize a meetup or workshop for visual artists in your city.
  2. Share the details online for people to RSVP (Facebook, EventBrite, Meetup, etc)
  3. Email us a link to the page and a shipping address for us to mail the free stickers to.

You can host anything from an informal coffee shop gathering to a full workshop, hackathon or jam session. Schools and other organizations that teach classes are also eligible, just send us an email!

Once you receive the stickers, bring them to your meetup and hand them out to people who show up. Use it as an opportunity to exchange your knowledge about VDMX with people who are experts with other tools.

Bonus points if you send us photos from the event to include in our image gallery showing off possible uses for your stickers!

And don't forget that you can also order your own VDMX coffee mugs, available in standard and high-defination models.

The Hap Video Codecs, Now Available For Windows!

[Update July 2018 – there is a new website with the latest information about the HAP video codecs: http://hap.video]

Front Pictures pushes the limit, 26 layers of Hap Q on 52 projectors played from Touch Designer on Renaissance

Front Pictures pushes the limit, 26 layers of Hap Q on 52 projectors played from Touch Designer on Renaissance

Last year in a collaboration Tom Butterworth we had the pleasure of sharing a powerful new set of open source video codecs called Hap with the Mac real-time video community. The goal of Hap was to serve a broad audience with the same need to push more pixels, benefiting everyone from show designers on expensive media servers handling 2k and 4k arrays to weekend VJs now able to playback multiple HD streams off a laptop.

One thing we've learned about artists in our time writing video performance software is that in the real world they take advantage of all kinds of tools for different projects and to create their unique visual style. With every new application that adds native support for the Hap suite, now counting at more than a dozen, it makes it easier to get the best performance regardless of what software is used to get a job done.

This mixing and matching of software isn't limited to a single platform and today we're extremely excited to announce that the GPU accelerated codec of choice on the Mac is now officially supported on Windows!

As of this announcement, the Hap video codec family can now be natively used on Windows in TouchDesigner, OpenFrameworks (via ofxHapPlayer), Jitter (via jit.gl.hap), DirectShow and Unity (via RenderHeads AVProQuicktime), with support coming very soon to D3 Media Servers and the Isadora programming environment.

To celebrate, we've updated the Hap homepage to include our new photo gallery of the various applications and frameworks that have adopted the format on both platforms. The homepage is also the place to check out how Hap compares to other commonly used codecs for live visuals.


The installers for the QuickTime Hap codecs for Mac and Windows can be found on the downloads page: https://github.com/vidvox/hap-qt-codec/releases/

(remember that the application you're using will also need to natively support Hap!)

Mac and Windows developers who are interested in learning more about Hap can visit the GitHub project page for technical details and sample code: https://github.com/vidvox/hap

Thanks again to all of the developers who have helped build this Hap-py community, and infinite praise for the infamous Tom Butterworth who continues to make it all Hap-pen.

Behind the scenes of Minuek visuals with MÙM at Looking Outside My Window Festival

From one of our favorite regular guests Minuek comes this stunningly beautiful collaboration with Tupac Martirs and a huge production team to create the visuals for Múm at the Looking Outside My Window Festival.

Below, a few images and some videos from the performance followed by an explanation from Minuek about how the project came to be and his techniques for getting ready for the show.

I was recently invited to perform at Tupac Martirs, Looking Outside My Window Festival in London. The event combine music, art, visuals, performance, dance, cuisine and cinema.

For the Saturday night event I worked alongside lighting director Bambi Buneo first creating visuals for a short set by Bruno Zamborlin and Plaid using Mogees (http://mogees.co.uk/) For this set I ran single Quartz Composer patch that slowly developed for the duration of the set.

The main event of the night was the performance from Múm, All the video had been created created in the 2 weeks before the show after receiving the set list and rendered out in the Hap codec using QTZ Rendang. The benefit of this is the ability to use very high amounts of iteration for building complex scenes. I normally prefer to use as many Quartz patches live as possible. For this show working with a band like Múm required a much more planned process. Working to the setlist I created clips for each track and made heavy use of the Layer Mask.fs effect.

VDMX set up was a 2 channel mixer with 4 Layer on each side. One Layer with the Layer Mask.fs applied to each side and using a Livid Ohm to control all effects and fades live. Other .fs effect used were VVMotion Blur, False Color and Displacement Distortion.

Mappathon and VDMX Workshop at Mapping Festival 2014 in Geneva

For the first time ever this year we'll be heading to the Mapping Festival in Geneva to participate in a special 3 Day NYC Mappathon event. Along with our very own David Lublin (who will be sharing VDMX tricks) the event will also feature Syphon creators / Quartz Composer masters Anton Marini (aka vade) and Tom Butterworth (aka bangnoise), and hosted by CHiKA of Mappathon.

More information and sign up can be found on the Mapping Festival website here:

http://www.mappingfestival.com/2014/workshops/ny-mappathon/

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VDMX Masterclass @ ACMI and streaming online March 1, 2014

Hey everyone!

Next Friday I'll be doing a remote workshop to ACMI in Melbourne along with the infamous Jean Poole. For those of you who can't make it to Australia for the event we'll also be streaming the whole thing over the net for anyone who wants to follow along.

The event will take place on March 1st, 2014 at 12-3PM A.E.S.T. (online viewers remember to check your time difference), then go to the online youtube stream.

New Free Video Clip Packs from CandyStations

A few months back we did an artist profile on the work of Deborah Johnson, aka CandyStations. It's taken a little time but we've finally gotten her to put together a set of video clips for all of us to add to our VJ loop collections.

In particular these sets include several movies rendered at an extra wide resolution of 3840 x 1080 for display on dual output setups, and the “Flower Drops” clips are all encoded in Hap Alpha making them especially useful as overlays on top of other video layers.


Download the free clip packs here:

or download preview versions of all 22 clips in h264 – sorry no alpha channels with these versions but you can convert them to Hap (or another codec) yourself for a faster download.

Fantasia Drops

Space Nebula

Solar Wind

Stippled Geos

Paper Planes

Ribbons

Flowers

Shape Trip

Variations at 32 x 9 aspect ratio

These clips are totally free to use for non-commercial use. Thanks again to CandyStations!

DIY 3D Projection Mapping with VDMX On Instructables

From Dominic Sandoval aka Doctypebeats comes this great walkthrough on setting up a DIY 3D Projection Mapping system using VDMX, a projector and some foam core panels.

For my design, I wanted something lightweight, easy to transport, versatile, and of course nice and bright. The solution was foam core panels, which I bought at my local hobby shop. The large panels cost $8 dollars while the smaller panels cost $6. 6 Panels were purchased in total. 2 - 30"X40" and 4 - 20"x"30".

Volume Unit, from The Media Workshop LTD at Lumiere 2013

This project by The Media Workshop LTD and Artichoke was part of Lumiere 2013, a four-day international light festival in Durham, UK last November.

“The public are able to tweet their favorite track and then that track is live VJ'd live on the side of the building. So Tim and Darren are frantically working being the scenes to pick all the graphics and colors that you can see to essentially make the building dance to the track that is playing.”

Looks like a pretty massive setup including 6x 20k projectors, 2x Retina Macbook Pros, VDMX, Quartz Composer, and a bunch of MIDI controllers and iPads. More information can be found on their vimeo page.

Introducing ISF Video Generators and FX

ISF stands for "Interactive Shader Format", and is a file format that describes a GLSL fragment shader, as well as how to execute and interact with it. The goal of this file format is to provide a simple and minimal interface for image filters and generative video sources that allows them to be interacted with and reused in a generic and modular fashion. ISF is nothing more than a [slightly modified] GLSL fragment shader with a JSON blob at the beginning that describes how to interact with the shader (how many inputs/uniform variables it has, what their names are, what kind of inputs/variables they are, that sort of thing). ISF isn't some crazy new groundbreaking technology- it's just a simple and useful combination of two things that have been around for a while to make a minimal- but highly effective- filter format.

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Making a gameshow powered by VDMX and Quartz Composer by I Love QC

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Our friends over at I Love QC reminded us that the tools we normally use for live visuals and installations can be used in ways we never really thought of before – for this project they made a gameshow for the iSellMobile Awards 2013. The system was powered by solely by VDMX and Quartz Composer along with a dozen Samsung tablets for the contestants to buzz in.

For more details and additional photos visit the I Love QC Blog, or check our recent guest tutorial with Shakinda for an introduction to using Quartz Composer.

Bundle Deal, VDMX + Livid OhmRGB = Save $300

Hey Everyone!

Back in September we ran a special two-week promotional deal with MIDI controller maker Livid Instruments featuring a bundle to save $300 when buying VDMX and the OhmRGB together through the Livid Online Shop.

Since the deal ended we heard from a bunch of people who missed out, and after unofficially sending out a few coupon codes, we've decided to go ahead and officially extend the offer through the end of the year!

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NYC VDMX User Group Meetup at Dubspot, Oct 21st 2013

Just wanted to make a quick announcement that David Lublin from VIDVOX (the guy who writes most of the posts & tutorials for this site) will be hosting a VDMX user group meeting at Dubspot in NYC on Monday, October 21st starting at 7 PM.

It's free, open to the public, and appropriate for all levels of expertise for VJs, lighting designers, and anyone else looking to learn more about live video production techniques.

More information in the Dubspot event posting on Facebook, hope to see you there!

And for those of you who can't make it in person, check out the first part of the new tutorial series that we'll be covering, Fundamentals of Video Taught with VDMX

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New free video clips from Minuek

Earlier this week one of our favorite Quartz Composer gurus Minuek shared two new sets of free video loops over on his blog. Aside from being solid clips for VJing, we thought they were particularly noteworthy because they were made using QC compositions and recorded as real-time output,

With the Space World clips i was really trying to make something that looked like it wasn't made in Quartz Composer. I had been discussing QC with someone and they said you can always tell it's made in Quartz so i set out to change that. When i first posted some pictures plenty of people were curious if its was all quartz. 

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Back to School Sale Fall 2013 – Now Ended :(

With college classes back again, we thought it would be a perfect time to have another sale on VDMX to help students and up and coming VJs start off the fall semester. 

Through September 9th, you can get VDMX for only 99 USD by sending us a school photo ID card, or by participating in our  “starving artists” discount program.

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