VJ Blogs & VJ Software

Hypertext artist and now VJ, Mark Amerika has started a ‘Professor VJ‘ blog, pointing recently to an interesting ‘self-distribution manifesto‘ by the director of the SEX ADDICT, Caveh Zahedi:

“..we make the world our own by altering it, by leaving our own imprint on it, by reshaping it in our own image. This is the crux of my argument for self-distribution. It’s less alienating. It’s more organic. And it’s more human.”

Via AccentFeed, I discovered the Barcelona VJs ‘No Domain TV‘ who use only vector based illustration software to make live video. Check out how slickly they manage this at a Kid Koala show.

Via VJ Yroyto’s blog, comes notice of one of the best looking all-in-one video viewing applications yet – ‘Democracy‘ – which boasts lots of smart features, can subscribe to podcasts, video blogs and bit torrent feeds and much more.

“>’glitch creator’ stand-alone made with Max/MSP & Jitter ( the video add-on for Max ).

Via Writing My Name in Water, Brush, a free tool also made in max which plays simply and effectively with video camera input, decay and feedback.

Freeframe is a plug-in architecture for VJ software worth looking at, a standard much as VST plug-ins work on most audio applications… – the ( mostly free ) plugins on offer work in applications like After Effects as well..

Max / MSP is a patch based application, meaning it is a modular graphic environment where different components can be joined or linked together to produce highly customisable software for manipulating audio and/or video. An free and open source alternative ( also by the founder of MAX, Miller Puckette ) is Pure Data, which has recently released some updates for mac, windows and linux. And gaining popularity is ‘Processing‘ another free open source programming language / environment for manipulating image and sound. Branches within, link to using processing with mobile phone projects and other forms of hardware.

Quartz Composer is a light-weight patcher compared to these, bundled free with mac os X 10.4, but it is still a complex toolkit for building your own custom VJ application with fast frame rates ( thanks to it’s use of the on-board graphics processor, rather than the CPU ). ‘Quartonian Mixer‘ is the best example built to date, and remains free alongside other quartz composer patches by Roger Eskaton- such as ‘Quartonian VSM‘ which manipulates folders of photos on the fly.

Also building free Quartz Composer patches, is Momo the Monster, maintainer of the Lavaflow VJ blog from Los Angeles. His patches include a tool for making seamless video loops, and a quicktime movie which will allow live camera input into it ( thereby gaining live camera ability in VJ applications without that function ) and
. Also discovered Daisyrust.com’s patch to automatically produce an adjustable reflection from an image, text or video input from Lavaflow.

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