ProjectMilkSyphon – Free MilkDrop Music Visualizer to Syphon App For VJs

ProjectMilkSyphon is a free app to create sound reactive visuals from an audio input to your computer such as a built-in microphone or line in and mixed into your favorite VJ software over Syphon.

This tool is possible thanks to the projectM community who did all the years of hard work that are behind this project and generously made it available under the terms of the LGPL.

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Spirals and Loops: New Free Video Clip Pack!

Download Spirals And Loops in Hap Alpha

Today we've got a new free clip pack courtesy of Herry, one of our recent visual performance students from Dubspot who was using his motion graphics skills to make his own video loops to use at live gigs.

One of the useful techniques discussed in class is creating several variations on a theme or style to have in your clip library during a live show. This can be in the form of having different color palettes, or exporting individual parts of your compositions with included alpha channels. Often this is normally part of the process when creating clips, but often instead of trying to create several clips, people focus on making one 'perfect' version which can actually be less useful in a live setting.

By having multiple similar versions of a clip you can quickly select the best one to match the needed energy level. It can also allow for creating more interesting performances where mixes begin simple and have new elements layered on along with the music.

This set of clips is designed for just that purpose. Each clip is in Hap Alpha so you can layer them on top of each other and there are several variations that can be switched between. They also serve as a good example of how simple changes in style can influence the feeling of a loop. The intention for a live mix was to start with the simple black and white outlines and then introduce the ones with color, but you can use them any way you'd like.

Here's a few examples from the collection:

PS These clips are totally free to use!

GifToSyphon: Free Giphy Search To Syphon Tool for Mac VJs

Download GifToSyphon (requires Mac OS X 10.9.5 or later)

GifToSyphon is a free Mac utility that combines two things that VJs love – Animated GIFs and Syphon.

Giphy + Syphon = Instant kittens in your VJ set

Powered by the awesome Giphy search engine, a Mac VJ with an Internet connection can now instantly pull tagged GIFs from a huge online library and use them directly in their favorite Syphon enabled video application.

When not connected to the net GifToSyphon can also still use images from its local cache or using any of your own animated GIF files. These downloaded GIFs can also be loaded into most VJ software for remixing alongside your other media files.

For a quick introduction to using GifToSyphon with VDMX watch this new video tutorial:

 
 

(using the 4 channel mixer example via the Templates menu if you're trying to reproduce at home)

Features:

Remix GIFs in VJ software.

Search the huge GIPHY library.

Caches downloaded GIFs.

For those who are interested in seeing how GifToSyphon works behind the scenes we've also open sourced the code on GitHub: https://github.com/dlublin/GifToSyphon

Lastly a huge thanks to Giphy team and community for letting us access their repository of GIFs!

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!

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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And the winner of the VideoPong “Share Everything” contest is...

Earlier this week over on VideoPong we announced the winner and runner up in the “Share Everything” contest celebrating the addition to share attachments along with movies hosted on their site, making it easier for people to share their Quartz Composer compositions, Processing examples, and custom apps with other artists.

The winning composition can be downloaded here without signing up for VideoPong, and if you'd like to get access to the rest of the submissions it’s a great online community to become involved with.

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Glowing Pictures artist feature and free visual performance clip download

Download the Glowing Pictures 'Conception' video performance pack in Hap 720p or PhotoJPEG 720p.

There's so much to say about Benton-C Bainbridge and V Owen Bush of Glowing Pictures that I won't even try to scratch the surface here. We've known them personally — and they've been using VIDVOX software — since the very beginning of the company. Both of them have been working with video for longer than we've been on earth, so to call them pioneers in this field is a bit of an understatement. Over the years the two have worked together and separately on hundreds of live performances, installations, architectural spaces, music videos, Visual Performance workshops, and films for both dome and 3D projection, with a high profile client list that has included everyone in town from The Beastie Boys to Lincoln Center.​

As always the duo are involved in a number of projects at a time - they've kicked off 2013 with the 'Vision of the Week' series, 52 completely new video paintings and performances, one of which was the inspiration for the set of sample movies they've produced for todays Visual Performance pack download based on the Cell Shading Experiment presets and After Effects tutorials from designer Matt Trunks.

What we're most excited for is their new Visual Performance program being taught out of Dubspot in NYC where DJs and musicians are showing up to learn how to be visual performers.​​ Their website includes some video tutorials on using VDMX alongside Ableton Live and the APC40, so even if you don't live in the area of Dubspot headquarters they have some knowledge to share with you.

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V Owen Bush (left) and Benton-C Bainbridge (right)

Photo by Dave Pentecost, East Village Planetarium

If you'd like to see Glowing Pictures live this spring, they're the resident visual designers of the American Museum Of Natural History's monthly One Step Beyond series. The new 2013 season kicks off May 10th with James Blake, and if you miss that, the next OSB is on June 7th. You can also see them performing on May 17th and 18th alongside V Squared Labs at the Electric Daisy Carnival in NYC.

And this post would not be complete without a major shout out to Nalepa and TeamSupreme ​for usage of the audio track in the above trailer for the 'Conception' clips pack.

More about the Hap codecs + Free Sample Clip Set by Momo The Monster and Middlman

To celebrate the recent adoption of the Hap video codecs by a number of our fellow Mac VJ apps, today we're sharing a set of royalty free A/V oops created by Momo The Monster and Middlman titled 'pacificCoast' that highlight the use of transparency when compositing layers. The clips are available pre-encoded in Hap 1080p and Hap 480p, and include a VDMX project that demonstrates how to get the most out of the using movies that contain alpha channels.

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Presenting Hap, a family of open-source GPU accelerated video codecs

Today we are happy to share the fruits of a collaboration with Tom Butterworth that has been in the works for about a year now: Hap, a new video codec designed specifically for digital video artists and Mac VJs with the goal of achieving higher-performance video playback in OpenGL-based applications such as VDMX.

Instead of using the CPU to decode video frames, Hap passes compressed image data directly to your computer's graphics card for hardware accelerated decompression of movies during playback. By shifting this burden from your CPU to your GPU, Hap makes it possible to use more movies at higher resolutions than typical CPU-bound codecs.

Hap comes in three different flavors to meet the needs of real-world usage: Hap, Hap Alpha, and Hap Q. Hap offers the lowest data-rates for playing back the most clips at a time. Hap Alpha is similar to Hap, but adds support for transparency. Hap Q encodes at a higher data-rate to achieve significantly cleaner images when quality is a priority over performance and file size.

 

Click to read more about Hap...

 

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