Three quality-of-life upgrades for the latest VDMX
We've been chipping away at three new features that all share the same goal: less friction between the idea in your head and the visuals on stage. The latest VDMX release adds Control Surface Expressions for writing tiny math snippets between UI items, Plugin Templates for saving any plugin's state and reusing it across projects, and a new System Permissions Status Preferences pane that shows you exactly which macOS permissions VDMX is — or isn't — approved for.
Here's a quick tour of each, follow the links for more detailed documentation and tutorials.
Control Surface Expressions
Editing a Color expressions in a Control Surface.
Until now one of the common limitations in VDMX for working with data-sources was situations where you needed a bit of 'glue' to combine multiple data-sources together with some simple math and logic. Control Surface Expressions fill that gap. They're scriptable data-sources that live inside each Control Surface plugin, written in a small expression language and evaluated very quickly in real time.
There are four kinds of expressions, each publishing a data-source of its matching type:
Float Expressions
Boolean Expressions
2D Point Expressions
RGBA Color Expressions
Under the hood they're powered by the ExprTk library, which provides arithmetic, conditionals, loops, local variables, arrays, and a generous standard library of math functions. Expressions are managed from the Expressions tab of the Control Surface inspector — add, remove, rename, and pick which one you're editing from the list. The Show Variables button pops up a list of every UI item and other expression you can reference from the current surface.
A simple pass-through looks like this:
Float_Expr := Slider_1
Adding two values together looks like this:
Float_Expr := Slider_1 + Slider_2
And the same system can be used to make crossfades, gates, switches, custom LFOs built from stacked sine waves, and more. The new update includes loads of examples as Plugins Templates that can be easily loaded to perform simple math and logic, or used as starting points for your own creations. For more detailed information see Using Control Surface Expressions in the VDMX documentation.
Plugin Templates
Quickly reload saved Plugin Templates from the Workspace Inspector
VDMX has had Workspace Templates for a while — a way to capture the state of an entire workspace to reload as a new starting point. The new Plugin Templates feature expands on this by adding the ability to save the state of an individual plugin to reuse it anywhere.
It works for every plugin type, but it's especially useful for Control Surfaces (reusable controller mappings) and Media Bins (curated playback setups for a specific show or rig).
You can create, load, and manage Plugin Templates from three places:
The Plugins tab of the Workspace Inspector: pick a template when adding a new plugin, or right-click an existing one to load or save a template.
The Templates Manager window: search, categorize, and add thumbnails and descriptions to your templates. (Templates → Manage Templates…)
The Finder: Plugin Templates are just files inside the VDMX Assets folder, so you can organize, duplicate, rename, or share them like any other file.
Use the Templates Manager to add images and descriptions to saved Plugin and Workspace Templates.
Plugin Templates and Control Surface Expressions pair well: build a Control Surface that combines your hardware mapping with the math you need on top of it, save it as a template once, and reuse it in new projects. For more information see Using Plugin Templates in the VDMX documentation.
System Permissions Status
If you've ever spent ten minutes trying to figure out why audio capture was silent or window capture was black, the answer was almost certainly a macOS permission that got denied or never prompted. macOS asks once, and if you miss it, you're stuck wandering through System Settings looking for the right toggle.
The new Permissions section of VDMX Preferences shows the live status of every system permission VDMX uses, in one place. The fastest way there is Help → Check App Permissions…, which opens Preferences right to the relevant pane.
If any of these sound familiar, this pane is the first place to look:
Audio capture is silent
Video capture is black
Window / screen capture doesn't work
Some files don't load when dragged from the Finder
OSC or other network features misbehave
Each permission shows its current status so you know whether to re-authorize it in System Settings, and you don't have to guess which one was the problem. For more information see the Troubleshooting Permissions section of the VDMX documentation.
New FX and Generators
No update to VDMX is complete without a few new video filters and sources!
For this release we have three new FX: Chromatic Aberration, JPEG Block Corruption, and Triangle Mosaic
And three new generators: Worley Cells, Simplex Noise, and Ridgelines
And as these are ISF based generators and filters, you can open them up to see how they work, or further remix them to make your own custom versions with additional parameters and capabilities.
We hope you find these new time saving features for VDMX as useful as we do, and as always stay tuned for more updates coming soon!