Download the completed project file for this tutorial.

A question that comes up for modern live visualists is how to best work with footage that doesn’t match the aspect ratio that is being used for the final display. Two particularly common situations are when you may be working with older format video that is 4:3 and in other cases it could be camera phone footage captured in vertical mode. In some cases it is okay to use the basic “fill” option within the composition mode settings so that the imagery is scaled to fill the entire output area when needed, but another useful technique is the “LiveLeak” style effect where a blurry version of the image appears blown up in the background.

In this video tutorial we walk through how to create this style within VDMX, with the high level steps being:

Load in a media file that is in an aspect ratio other than 16x9 (in this case the picture of Lexie provided by Fish2000!) and trigger it onto Layer 1.
From the Workspace Inspector in the Layers tab, inspect Layer 1 and use the Layer Composition Controls to set the Composition Mode from “OpenGL Add” to “OpenGL Over” so that the layer will appear over any background video.
From the Workspace Inspector in the Layers tab, click the + button to add a second layer.
Inspect Layer 2 and in the Layer Source Controls section click on the “Use Source:” pop-up menu and choose the Layers > Layer 1 option to receive video from the top layer.
Use the Layer Composition Controls to set the Sizing Mode for Layer 2 from “Fit” to “Fill” so that the background image is scaled to fill the canvas.
Use the Layer FX for Layer 2 to add a blur FX, such as Multipass Gaussian Blur. Try adding other FX such as Zoom and Color Controls to create different styles.

After completing this tutorial, check out how to use an iOS device camera as a live input for VDMX!