Mappathon and VDMX Workshop at Mapping Festival 2014 in Geneva

March 28, 2014

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/

VDMX Masterclass @ ACMI and streaming online March 1, 2014

February 22, 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.

Behind the scenes of DATA by WOLFSHIRT

February 19, 2014

Earlier this week we caught this psycho-3D-feedback music video by WOLFSHIRT on vimeo described as “A visualization of a signal path through a computer” and had to drop them an email asking for more information on how they put it all together and the inspiration behind it.

Black Syphon: Free Syphon to Blackmagic Utility

February 14, 2014

This simple, free utility makes it possible for any Syphon enabled software to efficiently send and receive video streams to and from Blackmagic Design hardware devices such as the Intensity Pro, Intensity Shuttle, DeckLink series, MiniMonitor / MiniRecorder, and UltraStudio 4k.

New Free Video Clip Packs from CandyStations

January 23, 2014

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:

Flower Drops (Hap Alpha)
Space Dance (Hap)

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.

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

DIY 3D Projection Mapping with VDMX On Instructables

January 22, 2014

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".

Read the whole post over on the instructables website.

Volume Unit, from The Media Workshop LTD at Lumiere 2013

January 15, 2014

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

December 24, 2013

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.

XTRNGR A/V SET Teaser

December 20, 2013

Not much info from the Desilence Studio on their XTRNGR A/V SET teaser that was shared by Søren on the forums, but it is making our Friday, so without further ado,

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

December 13, 2013

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

November 5, 2013

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!

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

October 16, 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.

Recipient.cc projection maps the Pirelli Tower for Adidas

September 25, 2013

Todays feature comes from the Recipient.cc collective in Italy who a few months ago did this beautiful projection mapping job on the Pirelli Tower in Milan for Adidas Boost.

Along with the video showing the live visual effects on the building in action they've also made a great behind the scenes documenting the process from start to finish.

New free video clips from Minuek

August 29, 2013

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.

Back to School Sale Fall 2013 – Now Ended :(

August 26, 2013

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.

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

August 22, 2013

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.

New VDMX Update with “Waveclock” Automatic BPM Detection, MIDI / OSC Echo, and More!

July 15, 2013

Hey everyone,

It's once again time for us to show off some of the awesome stuff we've been working on here in the VIDVOX labs with a new release to VDMX! There's quite a bit to go over in the latest update (ready to download and install), so let's get started..

Automatic BPM Detection by Wavesum:

The most exciting new feature in this update is a collaboration with Wavesum to bring one-click automatic BPM detection to the VDMX “Clock” plugin. If you've previously tried the Waveclock standalone application to send MIDI clock to a VJ application, you already know it's pretty tight clock sync, and with native support built directly in it's even more useful. Watch this video demonstration, then try running the example template alongside some of your favorite music.

MIDI / OSC Talkback, aka “Echo” mode:

For faster workflow when using of two way talkback of MIDI and OSC controllers, we've added a new “echo” option to all of the standard interface controls that can be used to relay the current slider / button / menu value back to your favorite hardware controller. This new feature can also be used to put together VDMX behaviors that were previously either not possible- such as lighting up button in sync with slider interesting marks- or time consuming to set up. To get a sense of some of the possibilities check out the new tutorials and templates explaining how to use “echo” with instruments like the Livid OhmRGB, Akai APC40, and TouchOSC for iPad.

TouchOSC layout importing in the Control Surface:

In the “Control Surface” plugin we've added two new UI item options: multi-button and multi-slider which are especially useful for creating layouts that match up with MIDI and OSC controllers. To allow for an even closer mimicking of remote hardware interfaces, it is now also possible to include knob style controls by resizing sliders to be a square shape in its layout grid. Additionally, TouchOSC users can now directly import their template files to generate UI layout for the Control Surface plugin, including all the labels and addresses of each interface item.

v002 Quartz Composer plugins and 14 new FX:

With this update we are now including an extra installer that adds an extra set of awesome “Glitch” and “Film” style image processing FX, highly optimized blurs (gaussian, motion and zoom) which can be used instead of their CoreImage counterparts, and the “Rutt Etra” analog synthesizer emulator. Thanks to Anton Marini (aka vade) and Bill Etra for this!

Also make sure to check out the GitHub page for the v002 plugins where you can find more useful objects to use in your custom QC compositions.

Apply Custom Math Expressions to Sliders:

Now each slider in VDMX has the ability to type in simple math expressions to pre-process incoming control data. Particularly useful when working with OSC numbers that aren't already ranged from 0.0 to 1.0 – for setup, "$VAL" is the passed val, "$MIN" and "$MAX" refer to the current slider min and max.

Behind The Scenes:

A few other noteworthy additions: support for 14-bit MIDI control values (for example from Serato controllers) can be enabled in the MIDI section of the preferences, a new option for assigning endless OSC rotary controls (for example the encoder TouchOSC control) to adjust slider values, 'continuous' and 'range' detect mode to local preset UI items, pop-up buttons, and slider marks.

On top of all this and the usual bug fixes, we've made a lot of back end optimizations that make switching between presets significantly faster- read the full list of changes for all of the details.

VDMX Mugs, Available In Standard and High Def

June 4, 2013

Today we're proud to release our newest addition to the product line, our first venture from software into drinkware to help add a little extra power to your live visuals setup, the “VDMX5 Icon” mugs, now available for purchase on cafepress!

End of Semester Artist Submissions Round Up

May 25, 2013

Our end of semester & special artist rate sale is over, but I wanted to take a quick break to share some of the things people have sent in to us so far..

End Of Semester Sale, Ended May 27th!

May 13, 2013

If you're on this page, you are probably looking for information about our end of semester sale on VDMX– well, sorry, you missed it, we taking in requests for the special offer at 11:59 PM EST on May 27th.

But the good news is, you can still take advantage of our regular discounted rate for students, teachers and other educational faculty to get VDMX for just 199 USD..