My second night of VJing was a headfist dive into mashup territory with four other jocks at LoveTech in San Francisco. My clips were mostly ripped from videogramo, dvdp and max capacity, all of who got shouts in the scroller. A few new clips I shot around Rincon Center in San Francisco were also used and uploaded to my videopong account. The musicians I was most active for were thafruitbat (sac) and Vapor Maché (la).

The night was fun and I learned much, just as I did on my fist night of VJing at dnalounge. Since my nanokontrol was in LA with Jesse of Modern Hacker for a Flaming Lotus Girls show I was stuck with my Faderfox LV-1.

When I picked up the LV-1 before touring europe in 2005 it was the smallest controller on the market. With that size comes a price: the controls are packed in super-cramp tight and in the dark I was often grabbing the wrong fader. After a night of that I was pining to finger the nanokontrol again, which is just as portable as the faderfox but with more spacious layout.

I got the job done all the same. To accommodate the LV-1 I reduced my VDMX patch to two primary layers/decks… plus the text scroller. Red this time rather than white but still the crisp 04b03 font.

With 50 clips loaded in I got a low memory error from VDMX–will have to look into prerolling/ramloading settings. I also ran into some trouble where I had to remove a USB key from my machine that had some clips on it. I moved them to the laptops hard drive and restarted VDMX which found the clips as soon as I hit “Relink with Spotlight.”

Signal mashup with other VJs was another change from my experience at dna lounge. Not being the sole culprit on the screen I didn’t have to worry about flow of the entire set. However, I was constantly checking what was projecting and making sure the material I had queued wouldn’t be totally jarring when it was unexpectedly mixed in.

The mashing also ment I had to fight to be seen and the projector had poor color representation (green was white, etc). So to get my most expressive pang for the buck I was doing a lot of cross-fader action between my two layers and a lot of inversion toggling to blast some impression of beat sync through my channel of the Roland V4.

I got a chance to ride on the V4 a few times when Pierre needed a break. I didn’t get too deep into effects but the huge cross fader was fun to dance back and forth. While it’s tempting to pick up a video mixer I can’t justify the price and really enjoy doing a VJ gig with a minimum amount of gear: laptop, nanokontrol, & pc2tv.

Since my last gig I searched a little bit for cheaper/better vga to svideo/composite boxes but the Grandtec GXP2000 I picked up from Radio Shack has worked fine. I found some things that looked exactly the same but black for $50 (half the price) but I couldn’t tell if it came with any cables. The Grandtec came with every cable I could need (even if the RCA is a little short) and the cost of those things can add up quick. So I’m hanging onto that thing, sticker time!

Before my next gig I’d like to find a workflow for importing animated gifs with transparency into a format that VDMX can eat while respecting the alpha. I’d ask on the VDMX forums but I haven’t been able to log in the last few days so it remains open.

Transparency from .mov files rendered by Flash (which exports with the Animation codec) is respected by VDMX but exporting collapsed-vert-scroller-glitch.mov there’s a glitch in the loop (the .mov doesn’t end at the exact same spot the timeline ends). Not sure how to resolve that but I’d rather play around with using SWF natively in VDMX which would allow me to have more control over the generative graphics.

That’s all the rambling I’d saved up but you can be sure I’ll post more as I continue to explore!