VJ Heaven

Seoul is currently hosting “Seoul Digital Culture Open (sedco.sab.kr)” from June 17 to 22 in order to present the operation of Digital Media City (DMC) to its citizens. The event was initiated by enterprises within the DMC as well as the people of Seoul. The unique aspect of this event will draw big crowds. I’m sure the way in which digital content is created from digital culture, research, production and circulation will be used to its full effect.

Digital Music Festival, being held on June 17, 18 and 21 will feature performances from university students and ‘indie’ bands. To keep things interesting, digital VJ’s will showcase their magic on large screens by mixing various digital clips. On the last day of the event, visitors will be able to watch the winning UCC as well as 58 other clips.

Perhaps one of the most interesting exhibitions of all, Digital Pavilion will offer visitors a change to experience the “future.” Film Museum featuring the history of Korean film through exhibition of artifacts is worth noting. The two exhibits will be available to the visitors without an admission fee. For those interested in the DMC itself, a DMC Culture Tour shuttles will also be available for free.

VISP is an open source visual performance application built on Adobe AIR (formerly Apollo) Rich Internet Application Platform.  Go to VISP-VJ.com  for source code and downloads. To run VISP you will also need Adobe AIR. The VISP homepage contains tutorials and guidelines for running, installing and creating artworks with the program. VISP looks to be a pretty exciting release for real-time digital visuals.

Is the future of digital artists a merging of designers, programmers, VJs, filmmakers and musicians? Just like Scratch Film, Scratch Video is not new but it is still being used in interesting and diverse ways. The following is a Scratch Live 1.8 demo.

The Mawzer Modular Control was first announced over two years ago. And just when you thought that it had become vapourware, its finally on sale. I’m not complaining. Modular controllers are the ultimate idea and are almost on the ‘wet your pants’ level. I just hope the modules don’t become all loose and wiggly.

You can find more about the Mawzer here

With an increasing need to create integrated hardware/software solutions, VJs are beginning to connect input devices with wii remote controls. In this video the controller is assigned to audio filters on the computer and controls some cool visuals. Wii may not have the control interface perfected yet so these early performances may seem a bit limited. But in the near future we should be seeing some interesting Wii VJ performances.

One of the biggest problems with being a VJ is finding footage to use. If you need some new visuals, Pixdisc is a fantastic compilation of copyright free visual materials that can be used with various VJ softwares. All the motion graphics come in half-size (320×240) and are recorded in two formats (Cinepak and Photo-JPEG). Cinepak format is for Pixplyer (VJ software) and the other one (Photo-JPEG) is for use in video editing. The materials are derived from the latest VJ artists, so you can feel blessed to be using them for your own VJing. Pixdisc can be found here.

Move over Windows, move over OSX. Pure Dyne is a high-performance, bootable Linux OS that has been modified for maximum Visual Performance and has been designed with Pure Data (Pd) as its central premise. Its a customization of the dyne:II core for realtime audio and video processing and is maintained by a growing community of media artists. If you are worried about installation problems on your current computer, you can just boot from a CD, USB key, or hard drive into your Mac or PC.

The allure of Pure Dyne is that it’s not just altering an OS to your needs - it’s taking your performance gigs with you without having to worry about OS problems. Pure Dyne comes optimized with software such as Jack, SuperCollider, Csound, Fluxus and of course Pure Data. Pure:dyne is entirely optimised for Pd, an open-source alternative to Max/MSP, and comes with an overwhelming collection of externals: PDP, PiDiP, Gem, GridFlow, RRadical, PixelTango. - all of which normally involve extensive installion time.

Pure Dyne is a pre-built installation OS. It’s like having a backup if your machine dies. But if you do want to install it as a bootable OS, then there is that option too. So, if you’re ready for some new visuals, its all here. Flash, now with the new Flash Player for Linux, can be integrated seamlessly into Pure Dyne. A custom Pd+Flash could be vj heaven for live visualist work. It all makes for a nice link between commercial releases and free software. Its a visually-tuned, custom performance and installation environment where many possibilities for creation are available.

Pure Dyne can be found at puredyne.goto10.org

If you are looking for a free and/or open source VJ tool, then Onyx is for you. This is an amazingly professional and flexible Flash-based VJ tool which allows you to mix video loops live. Its a great program and everything feels really intuitive. As a bonus, it now runs on both Windows and Mac. (Next stop, Linux/Pure Dyne) The latest release has some nice new features:

- Tempo filters can be turned on or off with a global setting

- Can sync tempo to specific beats.

- Mix files can now save display controls and filters

- Layers now have an anchor point for rotation or scaling

- Visualizers can be loaded in independant layers

- Tons of bug fixes and debugging tools</ol>

The latest release is 3.03 but 3.05 should be coming out soon (June) and we will keep you updated on the new features when it is released. Onyx is pretty much a must-have, even if only as a secondary / backup visual tool. This is a great free VJ tool. Kudos to the developers. I think it has a bright future.

You can download it here.