Announcing VDMX6 and VDMX6 Plus!!!

Hello VDMX Fans!

We’re thrilled to announce the official release of the biggest update to VDMX in over a decade: VDMX6!

What’s changed? Oh, just the entire rendering engine.

VDMX6 is now powered by Metal, fully transitioning away from the deprecated OpenGL technology. This update not only prepares us for the future of Mac hardware and OS updates but also opens new doors for upcoming features, improvements, and even more optimizations.

What’s else is new?

Read on! Looking to download the new release or buy a license? Visit the new Vidvox.net homepage!

HAP R

One of the first new benefits of our new Metal rendering engine is we can add support for the latest addition to the HAP video codec family!

Following in the footsteps of HAP Q, we now have HAP R.

What do you need to know about HAP R?

  • The HAP R format creates files that are higher quality than HAP Q, with alpha channels, at about the same size.

  • The latest AVF Batch Exporter utility app in the Extras folder includes support for importing / exporting to the newest variation of HAP.

  • HAP R is more technically known as HAP 7A because it is based on the BC7 texture format.

  • Other developers looking to update their own software to support HAP R will find technical details of the format on the HAP Specification and the HAP in AVFoundation framework GitHub pages useful in getting started.

Stay tuned for more details and benchmarks on HAP R in a future blog post!

Updated Automatic BPM Detection

Along with overhauling the rendering engine we’ve rewritten the tempo tracking algorithm completely from scratch to run natively on both Intel and ARM64 processors. No more having to use Rosetta to take advantage of this crucial feature on newer Mac hardware!

Leaner and Cleaner

Along with the performance boost of switching the rendering engine over to Metal we’ve optimized several other core parts of VDMX, making the app more efficient with an overall lower memory footprint.

New Pricing and Plus Version

One of the top things we hear from people who want to get started in working with live visuals is the financial barrier to entry. Along with adding feature improvements we understand that one thing we can do to make our software better is to make it more accessible to everyone and anyone, so we’ve decided to set the price on VDMX6 at 99 USD.

We have also introduced VDMX6 Plus at 249 USD for users who want to extend their experience by using TouchDesigner and Vuo compositions alongside the rest of the powerful features included in the standard version.

Students, teachers, and hobbyists can apply by email for our educational discounts of 25 USD on VDMX6 and 100 USD on VDMX6 Plus.

Upgrade Discounts

Existing VDMX5 users who purchased their license after September 12th, 2023 are entitled to a free update to VDMX6 Plus.

All other VDMX5 users can write in to receive a coupon to get 100 USD off on VDMX6 Plus.

Customers who have a license of VDMX6 can get the full price off of their original purchase if they choose to upgrade to VDMX6 Plus later.

TouchDesigner Support!

Using TouchDesigner compositions in VDMX6

Yes indeed, as mentioned just above, in VDMX6 Plus you can now use TouchDesigner compositions as interactive generators, effects, and control data plugins.

Note: that using TouchDesigner compositions in VDMX6 Plus requires a TouchDesigner install, and a valid paid TouchDesigner license on the same computer (Education, Commercial, or Pro) Non-commercial will not work.

Example compositions can be found on the VDMX6 dmg in the Extras folder and additional detailed information can be found in the VDMX documentation.

New ISF Generators and FX

No update to VDMX is complete without some new interactive video generators and FX to play with!

In this release we’ve got a new category of FX, Overlays, which include useful FX such as Doodler, Cursor, and Highlighter. These make it easy to add small elements on top of your video without having to do additional layer management.

There’s also some other new fun audio visualizers and glitch FX to play with:

  • Audio Waveform Shape

  • Pattern Glitch

  • Stylize Glitch

Improvements to BlackMagic and Video Capture Support

BlackMagic makes some of the most popular audio / video capture devices on the market, and we’ve just made using them with VDMX even better…

  • Use BlackMagic devices for simultaneous input and output, also known as full duplex mode, on supported devices.

  • Send audio streams to BlackMagic outputs.

  • Lower latency audio capture from BlackMagic inputs.

  • Apply key streams as alpha channels on supported devices.

  • Output alpha channels as external key streams on supported devices.

Themes and Interface Improvements

Find your favorite FX and sources even faster.

A major overhaul like this also deserves some new style, so we’ve included some new color themes and various minor interface tweaks throughout the app to improve overall usability.

One of the most useful UI additions is the new ‘Search’ field for quickly filtering the options in the layer source & FX menus.

Base and Recommended System Requirements

Minimum requirements: macOS 12; Intel or ARM64 Mac

Recommended OS: macOS 13 or later; M1 processor or later.

Sadly, we had to drop support for older OS releases where that could not take advantage of certain features and optimizations to Metal that were introduced in macOS 12. But we will continue to host old versions of VDMX5 to support older systems. See (VDMX Versions for details).

While VDMX6 will run on macOS 12 and Intel machines, the biggest performance gains are found in the newest OS releases and hardware where Metal itself is more optimized. We strongly recommend updating to macOS 13 or later where possible.

The Future???

With so many changes behind the scenes to create a stronger foundation for us to build on, one of the most existing parts of the VDMX6 update is what will come next… make sure to keep your eyes on this blog, tag and follow us on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram, and sign up for our email list to get the latest news from VIDVOX!

Updating from VDMX5? Read the FAQ!

We tried to make the process of updating from VDMX5 as seamless as possible: for example opening existing project files will create a copy that will be automatically updated to for the new version and GLSL based ISF shaders will be automatically transpiled as Metal shaders on launch.

Beyond that, we know that people updating from older versions have a ton of specific questions about the update process and we have created a VDMX5 upgrade FAQ page on this topic in the VDMX6 documentation. This page includes a listing of major changes to be aware of, and if needed we are also happy to answer questions you may have by email or on the forums.

With VDMX6 moving into Metal, some older plugins, custom FX, or ISF shaders may not be immediately compatible with the latest version. We recommend testing out the demo of VDMX6 first before making a full transition. If something is incompatible VDMX will do it’s best to give you a warning. And the best part is, you can have VDMX5, VDMX6, and VDMX6 Plus all installed on the same machine without conflict!

Dispatch from Mapping Festival 2024

Once again we have traveled across the Atlantic to join the Mad Mapper team for the infamous Mapping Festival in Geneva! As always it was a fantastic time getting to spend time with amazing visual artists from all over the world, seeing some mind blowing performances, and participate in workshops showing off the latest techniques in live visuals and projection mapping. We leave having spent time reconnecting with old friends, meeting new ones, and eagerly awaiting our next chance to come back!

For those who could not make it to Geneva this year we have published the slides and accompanying notes from our two day workshop on getting started with using GLSL and ISF for creating real-time visuals and effects to use in apps like VDMX and Mad Mapper, which you can find here: https://bit.ly/isf-mapping-2024

We also have some photos to share! Geneva is a beautiful city and an absolute joy to visit.

And be sure to follow us on instagram for more live updates and pictures from events such as this!

Video and Light: an Interview with Derrick Belcham

Derrick Belcham is a Canadian filmmaker based out of Brooklyn, NY whose internationally-recognized work in documentary and music video has led him to work with such artists as Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Laurie Anderson, Paul Simon and hundreds of others in music, dance, theater and architecture. He has created works and lectured at such institutions as MoMA PS1, MoCA, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum Of American Art, Musee D'Art Contemporain, The Philip Johnson Glass House, Brooklyn Academy of Music and The Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati. His work regularly appears in publications such as The New York Times, Vogue, Pitchfork, NPR and Rolling Stone as well as being screened at short, dance and experimental festivals and retrospectives around the world.


Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m a multi-disciplinary, collaborative artist that generally focuses on moving images of some kind or another. I’ve made hundreds of films in performance documentary and traditional “music video”, but I usually use VDMX for the fun stuff… experimental and live productions. Particularly, I love using VDMX for its audio-reactivity tools with video files and DMX lighting systems.

With it, I built the lighting and projection design of three of my large-scale immersive productions in the 60,000 sq ft behemoth of the Knockdown Center a few years back, the last with 300+ custom lighting heads all triggered to the sound of musicians and actors inputted into VDMX. It’s a really amazing environment to map out and deploy the technology of a piece, and allow for so many indeterminate, playful outcomes as you do.

What tools do you use?

I like a combination of analog and digital tools in my process, or else the feeling of “transience” gets a bit too prevalent for me… I like to start with a notebook and pen with most things, imagining then designing specifics of a system. Sometimes a very specific image will appear, and then the process would be working backwards through a set of problems that allow me to reach that vision.

I use Red digital cinema cameras and Leica R glass (digital + analog marriage made in heaven) along with a Fujifilm GFX 100S for stills on the digital side, and then a Braun Nizo 8mm and a number of weird/wild 35 and 120 cameras on the purely analog side. I have a lot of different filters, pre-made and homemade, for certain effects and really like to try and keep as much as possible “in-camera” before it makes its way onto the computer. 

With VDMX, my essential is an ENTTEC DMX interface and various dimmers and controllers to create custom shapes alongside traditional lighting heads. I use projectors quite heavily as well along with even haze to conjure all those Anthony McCall-type ephemeral shapes…

Last year, I made two projects with Bing & Ruth for the release of their latest, Species. David is an old friend, and I wanted to design a system in VDMX that he could operate almost like an EMS Spectron or one of the super early oscilloscope visual synths… I set up two stacked projectors in my darkened studio, hazed it to Irish winter dawn levels and put David in front of a set of knobs and sliders that shifted the shape, opacity, color and speed of the outputs from VDMX. A camera faced these shifting, volumetric rays and then displayed them in an inverted monitor (also in VDMX) so that he could “play” along to his song in realtime. The final video is one, unedit sequence of David’s visual performance.

Past Work:

I’ve utilised VDMX as the driver/processor of the lighting and video-reactivity on videos with Dave Gahan, Julianna Barwick, Blonde Redhead, My Brightest Diamond, Simon Raymonde and so many more the last 10 years that I’ve been using the program.

You can see them all at derrickbelcham.com

Recent and Upcoming Projects:

This last June, I went to Iceland to collaborate on two new pieces with Bergrun Snaebjornsdottir and Þóranna Dögg Björnsdóttir which took me all over the island collecting visual samples from the natural environment. As I went, I took photos of instances of pareidolia any time they hit me (faces in the rocks, symbols in the clouds, etc) and came back with a large repository. For a new art-metal project with Brooklyn composer Brendon Randall-Myers, I decided to mix those with the movements of a fantastic dancer named Jacalyn Tatro using a new sound-reactive process in VDMX. (That comes out this month, so I’ll send the link when it’s public! Sneak peek images here…)

Beyond that, I’m in the process of designing a new theatre piece fully within the VDMX environment that will use the performers visual and auditory input as the source for a kind of large-scale looping playground… very excited to keep experimenting with that these next few months. I love the power that the program has, but also how invisible it can be within a live production… it is such a beautiful thing when the audience can be held in a space of unknowing when it comes to the mechanisms of the illusion.

From Analog to Digital with Paul Kendall

An interview with Paul Kendall, a composer, producer and visual artist.

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From the past to the present, Paul Kendall has a career innovating music and sound. We caught up with him to get his story and talk about his evolution into the visual frontier with VDMX.

I come from a free jazz/ musique concrète beginning to a sound engineer/ mixer middle, culminating in a deafish composer/ visual artist attempting the final writes!

Between 85-97 I helped set up a series of studios for Daniel Miller’s Mute Records in London. I worked as the in-house engineer contributing in varying degrees to artists: Depeche Mode, Wire, Nick Cave, Nitzer Ebb, Barry Adamson, Renegade Soundwave etc.

Also during my time at Mute I established a sadly short-lived label devoted to experimental electro-acoustic music, The Parallel Series.

Basement demo studio in Covent Garden, London, 1979. Technology too expensive so with 2 friends we used a couple of Revox 2 track tape-machines, a basic console and a WEM Copicat our only outboard effect.

Basement demo studio in Covent Garden, London, 1979. Technology too expensive so with 2 friends we used a couple of Revox 2 track tape-machines, a basic console and a WEM Copicat our only outboard effect.

Home demo studio London 1984. Technology relatively affordable, 16 track Fostex Tape Machine, Allen & Heath 16 input console, DX7 synthesiser, Drumtraks Drum Machine, unseen but there Great British Spring Reverb, Time Matrix 8 tap digital delay.…

Home demo studio London 1984. Technology relatively affordable, 16 track Fostex Tape Machine, Allen & Heath 16 input console, DX7 synthesiser, Drumtraks Drum Machine, unseen but there Great British Spring Reverb, Time Matrix 8 tap digital delay. Soon I added BBC Micro Computer running UMI midi sequencing software.

My first musical/ hardware love was the tape recorder; around 1960 when I heard the simple slow down/ speed up possibility of an early 3 speed reel to reel, so it was sound more than music which fascinated me, but a total pipe dream as was most of the interesting technology in the 60’s and 70’s. I settled with a tenor saxophone and making noise was finally between my lips. A brief stay at University of York allowed me to learn the Revox tape machine/ tape loops/ VCS3 synthesiser but once again on return to London access to technology was limited. I had a job for 9 years in a bank so I was able to fund setting up a small studio with 2 friends to learn basic band demo recording using two 2 track machines and bouncing between them.

In 1984 following the sudden death of my mother I decided to leave the bank and with a small inheritance bought the new very affordable Fostex B16 16 track analogue tape machine, Allen and Heath mixing console, a BBC Micro Computer based sequencer UMI, a Yamaha DX7 synthesiser, Drumtraks drum machine, and most importantly an 8 tap digital delay unit called Time Matrix (almost an instrument in itself, a dub persons dream) and finally a Great British Spring Reverb.

I locked myself away to learn and experiment and as good fortune happened Daniel Miller knew of my endeavours and asked me to help setting up a similar facility for the Mute artists to demo and the lesser known artists to record masters.

The studio developed over the next 20 years or so into a fully functioning 24 track facility. At the end of 1990 I became aware of a significant new development from America the arrival of computer based digital audio. It was the moment where I fully embraced the binary world, bought a MacIIcI computer with Sound Tools/ Digidesign software for the first time enabling audio to be edited/ copied/ reversed/ EQ’d/ processed all within the digital domain. This may seem facile in the face of the acceleration of technology available today but back then the affect was considerable.

Mute Main Studio London 1988. Named, Worldwide International. Studio Design by Recording Architecture, Photo by Neil Waving. This was the 2nd studio for Mute which I was involved in and was my home for the next 9 years. The first was based on my hom…

Mute Main Studio London 1988. Named, Worldwide International. Studio Design by Recording Architecture, Photo by Neil Waving. This was the 2nd studio for Mute which I was involved in and was my home for the next 9 years. The first was based on my home studio, image 2, and was on the top floor of Rough Trade in Kings Cross, London.

Mute Programming Suite London 1988. Named, The Means of Production. Studio Design by Recording Architecture, Photo by Neil Waving. A second studio at Mute used initially for artists wishing to experiment and prepare their work before using the main …

Mute Programming Suite London 1988. Named, The Means of Production. Studio Design by Recording Architecture, Photo by Neil Waving. A second studio at Mute used initially for artists wishing to experiment and prepare their work before using the main studio.

One of the areas which benefited from digital audio and which liberated my approach was remixing. It was possible to perform lots of dub mixes on the console bouncing to DAT (previously the costs involved with analogue tape would have been prohibitive). These mixes could then be loaded into the computer and edited, this was a perfect example of performance/ dub being integrated into a final mix.

Since this period and until very recently my work was almost exclusively based on a Mac and Pro Tools or Logic software. However due to severe hearing/ frequency loss over the last 10 years I have been unable to pursue sound work creation on computer as with many digital processes it is possible that spurious ‘noise’ could be generated and I would be oblivious to it.

Refocusing I decided to revert to my earlier love of musique concrète so just using mechanically generated sound, springs, bits of metal etc. and using guitar pedals to process, so no computer involved. In addition to this I started experimenting with visuals, whilst my eyes still function!

I was searching for a method to work with visuals as I worked with sound. I began using a macro lens on my camera zooming in on small details of an object which is an equivalent of taking an existing sound and microscopically messing with it. I looked around for suitable software which could process the visuals and add a degree of performance too. This is when I discovered VDMX. I could slow down/ speed up/ reverse/ superimpose/ manipulate/ texturalyl shift visual material exactly the way with audio, and with the addition of a Korg NanoControl I could perform dubs on the visuals, great result. This set up has served me well for a couple of years and will continue to do so. Obviously I am a novice in the visual field which is in some ways liberating as I have never learnt the ‘rules’. The adage with sound; if it sounds right it probably is right can be applied to visuals/ light or so I maintain!

Home studio London 1990. Fully embracing the just available digital workstation from Digidesign. Originally called Sound Tools before evolving into Pro Tools. My set up was on a Mac IIcI, DAT machine, Atari 1040 running Creator midi software.

Home studio London 1990. Fully embracing the just available digital workstation from Digidesign. Originally called Sound Tools before evolving into Pro Tools. My set up was on a Mac IIcI, DAT machine, Atari 1040 running Creator midi software.

Home studio West Sussex 2021. In some ways this is the most powerful and tiniest set up of all. Mac Book Pro running Logic Pro, Final Cut and of course VDMX! Peripheral equipment: Shure SM7B, 8 channel mixer, Korg Nano Control studio, Zoom H6 6 trac…

Home studio West Sussex 2021. In some ways this is the most powerful and tiniest set up of all. Mac Book Pro running Logic Pro, Final Cut and of course VDMX! Peripheral equipment: Shure SM7B, 8 channel mixer, Korg Nano Control studio, Zoom H6 6 track digital recorder.

Back last May after isolating since the beginning of March (my partner had Covid very early on) I was searching for some creative inspiration and got hold of a couple of iPad apps which process sound. I spent 3 intense days experimenting and improvising using springs and things and voice as source. These improvisation morphed through editing to a series of coherent pieces of music/ noise. An album, Boundary Macro, from these will be released on vinyl later on in the year on Downwards Records and published through a return to Mute Song. So far I have finished 3 videos to accompany the album all made with VDMX.

You can see more visual work from Paul on Vimeo or follow his Instagram. And if you’re curious to learn more about VDMX, visit our tutorials page to get started.

ISF Website 2.0!

As many of you know, a few years ago we released the https://www.interactiveshaderformat.com/ as a place where people could share their custom GLSL based generators and effects to use with VDMX and other software for live visuals. Today we are excited to announce the first major revision to the website, with a redesign to make it easier to find and create shaders.

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January 2020 Back to School Sale

Once again we'll be running our special sale on VDMX for students and teachers heading back to school over the next couple of weeks with an extra 100 USD off; and we're even more excited to extend this same discount to ALL customers!

This means that from January 13th through January 20th, everyone can get a license of VDMX for just 249 USD, and students / starving artists pay only 99 USD.

Along with making great software for VJs and our related open source projects, one of the areas we have tried to focus on is creating educational materials to help visual artists at all levels help improve their craft. Over the last few years our website tutorials section has served as the main outlet for our various lessons, demonstrations and conversations of the various techniques used for all aspects of live visual performance. We also recently launched VV Edu, a set of lesson plans for teachers to use as a starting point for teaching live visuals and VJing in the classroom.

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Introducing ISF for Jitter

Today we are extra excited to announce an open source collaboration with the team over at Cycling74, creators of Max. Now all of the amazing ISF shaders that come with VDMX and on interactiveshaderformat.com can be used right alongside your other Jitter code using the jit.gl.isf object, available on Mac and Windows!

You can install jit.gl.isf directly from the Max package manager panel, accessible from the File menu. If you don’t already have any ISF shaders installed, also grab the free ISF Editor app for your appropriate platform. The free editor tool comes with the same standard set of 300+ generators, effects, and transitions we bundle with VDMX to get started with.

With this release Max joins the over a dozen apps and frameworks that support ISF as a standard for GLSL shaders. With ISF, there is no need to convert or translate code when moving between software. Write your generators and effects once, then use in Max, Motion, Final Cut Pro X, VDMX, on the web, and other video platforms. The specification includes conventions for working with multi-pass shaders with persistent frame buffers, allowing for the creation of complex compositions in a single easy to share file. The ISF documentation pages include detailed walkthroughs of the specification along with useful reference notes and a quick start for learning the basics of GLSL.

Want to learn more? Read more about it on the ISF for Jitter website, watch an introduction video tutorial, and visit the Max forums for more details from the Cycling74 crew. Developers curious to take a look under the hood can find the open source codebase in the jit.gl.isf repository. For the latest in ISF news, follow the @ISFVideo account on Twitter.

And don’t forget to check out some of our other tutorials describing techniques for using Max and VDMX together, such as using the OSCQuery Helper tool for simplifying OSC sync and sharing video streams via Syphon.