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

February 26, 2013

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...

The Light Surgeons interviewed by the British Arts Council

February 5, 2013

In case you missed it last week, The British Arts Council shared on youtube an in depth interview with live cinema pioneers The Light Surgeons about their current documentary SuperEverything* which took them to Malaysia to collaborate with local musicians and visual artists.

The Deadmau5 End of Year Show with Momo The Monster

January 4, 2013

Joining us from the road with Deadmau5 for our first post of 2013 is the infamous Momo The Monster--

In addition to his career as a visualist, Momo is known for the Make Space Ship and FiddlyBits apps for iOS and a bunch of other projects you can check out over at the mmmlabs website. You may also recognize his work with The Glitch Mob featured on our homepage.

We've put together a super edit of the videos he's sent us from the road on their non-stop stretch of holiday shows to watch- Then if you're curious for some behind the scenes continue on to the "How to do a Deadmau5 End of Year Show" tutorial.

Kicking off the new blog with the Eclectic Method

November 8, 2012

Welcome to the inaugural post of the Vidvox blog! We never though we'd have a blog, but while we were putting together the tutorials we realized that they were missing something: a place to comment on all the errata that doesn't quite fit neatly into the categories of tutorials. Between this blog and the ever-expanding tutorials, we hope to make this a place where everybody who uses VDMX will be able to find useful tips and interesting techniques to explore.

To help us kick off the new additions to our website, this week we'll be collaborating with master A.V. remixer Jonny from the Eclectic Method on our first series of artist technique tutorials. It's a three part series titled HOW TO DO AN ECLECTIC METHOD REMIX. Part one is available today with the rest coming over the next few days.

So what does an Eclectic Method remix look and sound like exactly?

[ Go check them out on youtube, watch a couple more mixes, we'll wait.. That Bill Murray one is pretty funny.. ]

So if you've enjoyed that and you want to get a sense of how this is accomplished, as promised, there's a brand new tutorial to help get you started. Or if you'd just like to learn more about the Eclectic Method check them out on the facebook and twitter and what the heck even the wikipedia has an entry that you'll want to read.