VJ software

Plastik Wrap is proud to announce that we will be using Troikatronix’s Isadora for our live video installation work from now on, and will be posting free video content and Actors (for use with Isadora) over the coming months.

Why have we, a well know fashion design company decided to include VJ software and clips on our website? For years Plastik Wrap has been involved in the electronic music/dance scene. We have had regular video installations at various Toronto based events for many years, we have also worked together with a number of artists and art collectives, and have produced our own fashion focused club-nights. It is these years of experience that have given us an archive of fashion photography, graphic design, and video footage that we feel you can put to good use. All footage will be licenced under a Creative Commons licence. We hope that the VJ/club community will continue to grow, and we thank you for all of the support you have given us.

As one of the founders of Plastik Wrap I have used Video as a fashion medium since the beginning of the company (more articles on my blog), and during most of that time have been using a software package for live render and performance called Visual Jockey. Transitioning from Visual Jockey to another system after years of development in Visual Jockey will not be easy, however; when your platform of choice starts to become obsolete and is discontinued it becomes a necessity.

To replace VisualJockey as our core VJ software I had a number of requirements that must be full-filled by the new application. Some of these requirements were very easily met by all the modern applications available today, while others really had to be sought out and only a few offered them in a variety of flavours.

Our top requirements where:
●Cross-platform
●Real-time audio driven effects (requires sound in)
●Live video input
●FreeFrame support
●API / SDK (ability to code custom plugins)
●Serial communication (with a focus on communication with Arduino based peripherals)
●DMX control
●Definable internal logic (a simple scripting language or node based logic branches)
●Midi support

Others that I hoped for so that we could easily extend the features of our installations where:
●TCP-IP
●3D support
●Adaptable User Interface
●Sound Output / Generation
●Other input devices
●Render to video file

The selection process was not as programmatic as I would have liked. In hindsight I would have liked to have compiled a list of applications to test and gone through them in a much more systematic way...

Instead I started searching for VJ software that had a few of the core requirements, and when I found a new one I instantly got excited and dove into it. This process proved to be both exciting and confusing. I started to loose track of my needs and started to get emotionally attached to certain features. I spent an extended period of time looking for a software interface similar to that of Visual Jockey. The visual node based design interface was one I was very familiar to and it felt like the perfect visual representation of all the steps involved in building a graphic in Photoshop, however; I found nothing quite the same.

While searching for VJ software you will come across many different apps, many of which use the old DJ gui metaphor, you know right and left channels and a cross-fader. Anything I found that fell into this category was instantly dismissed. Others that have evolved from the metaphor support multiple compositing channels, real-time effects and much more. Topping my list were: Vidvox, Modul8 and Resolume. I also liked the Reason like interface of Aestesis, but it appears to have been discontinued as well (although available for free now). In the end of the day, non of these applications really delivered on my requirements, Vidvox and Modul8 fell out of contention quickly because they are mac only, and Resolume although very flexible didn’t provide the logic features I was looking for... although it seems that with Apple’s Quartz Composer you can get around this with the Mac versions of these applications.

Quartz Composer is a visual development tool bundled with the Apple operating system that led me to discover a number of graphical programming environments. These environments where available under a number of licenses, including Open Source. The free nature of open-source was very appealing but after playing with what looked like the best of the open-source environments I found Pure Data (PD) too difficult to setup and get going in [read as limited documentation], it also appears to be very audio oriented so after a short trial period I gave it up. Much the same I have to say about PD’s commercial brother, MAX. I must say though that I didn’t give MAX a real run since its price was rather high, especially once you got the full bundle (needed for real video work). Some day I may put together a full Pure Data PD VS MAX msp comparison as it was unclear what the true differences between them are. A very popular system is VVVV, I really liked this software for the huge array of supported features and minimal interface, but as I played with VVVV I found that it took too long to get simple things done since you are starting from scratch every-time (also Windows only). If you are looking for an alternative to coding C++ using OpenFrameWorks, VVVV might suite you nicely. I do like VVVV’s license options, they extend a free license for non-commercial projects, so as an artist I really appreciated this. Last on my list of visual programming tools is Isadora, I was pleased with the simple install and setup of Isadora, also getting up and running was dead easy due to the great video tutorials provided. Within hours I had recreated a few of my video compositions from Visual Jockey in Isadora, this was looking very promising, I had not yet been able to recreate any of my VJ compositions in any of the other applications. Further it appears that all of my core requirements are met by Isadora in one way or another, as well as; offering additional features like OSC support. What am I most excited about trying? Two things really: DMX, we have already ordered a ILDA compliant blue laser to be our first addition that utilizes these new capabilities, and Serial communication, for use with a number of amazing arduino based systems we have planned.

So Isadora is the winner it seems, and for good reason.
●The authoring interface is simple, fast and powerful.
●The feature set suites my needs.
●The user community is very helpful (great manual and included examples as well).
●The price is fair.

Using Isadora, you quickly become aware of its background. Being born of the need for a tool to control video for modern dance theatre, Isadora’s interface includes Actors, Scenes and refers to the output as the Stage (reminds me Macromedia/Adobe Director although no Lingo required ;). Unlike other VJ software, and Graphical programming environments, Isadora did not come from a music oriented background, and therefore I found that although it offers real-time audio analysis it doesn’t provide simple features like access to the BPM. To deal with this I spent sometime during my initial learning of Isadora trying to create a custom user actor that would analyse the audio and give me some workable outputs, that I could then feed to my effects. This proved to be the hardest thing about learning Isadora for me since almost all my work is audio driven; because of this barrier I have decided to provide a download of a seven channel EQ user actor, with a few additional outputs for tracking the audio's tone/mood. It isn’t perfect and I will be working on it much more over time, but for now it gets things moving. Included is a simple patch (as seen above/right) that creates a video EQ with control sliders that adjust the data levels. I find it useful to help get my levels in setup. You can see how it has been used in my on-going Isadora project v-SYS as well as find more Isadora Downloads and Tutorials.

If you haven’t yet tried Isadora, a FREE trial is available for MAC and Windows.