Ableton Forum

bigbadotis wrote:Having taught Flash, After Effects, Processing and Quartz Composer at various points in my life I stand by my statement, even though I no longer personally use Flash myself.

Teaching is different than performing live visuals as VJ. I had audio visual company for few years, myself also VJing and doing fixed installations, so I know exactly what I am talking about. Sorry, perhaps I wasn't clear enough in my explanations.
In VJing you always try to minimise CPU and GPU, because anyway both run @ 100% (crashes due to overheating arent uncommon in VJ world) most of the time because of multiple layers, FXs. Flash used to be very popular for content creation but as I mentioned usually more complex stuff would be rendered to QT, and using codecs that are the most suitable for live manipulation.
Anyway Flash obsolete or not is just like After Effects for content creation, you cannot perform live visuals with Flash. You need "video instrument"= VJ software that can play movie clips, graphics and animated graphic like Flash.
There used to be more software companies catering to VJs but only few stayed in the game- there is too little money in it. Arkaos, Resolume and Module8 are the only ones in the biz, all 3 have possibility for playing Flash graphics, having default Flash libraries and supporting own creations. The possibilities to play visuals only with Live are very primitive, even with Max, but those VJ softwares support midi and Live can be very efficiently used to control VJ software. Arkaos even supports rewire but it is better to use separate computer for music and visuals.

yeah, you can use midi to play prepared Clips and control some effects.
But that's exactly where the problem is! he's looking for a way to GENERATE visuals live.
thats the big difference, many VJ's don't seem to understand...

And if you try to generate visuals based on Midi Data, you're going nowhere with traditional VJ-Software.
to do this, you'll need to have some programming done.
Its not about creating content to use in a video collage later. That's no biggie.
it's about turning actual Musical data into appealing and corresponding visual output.
whole different storry!

BTW: owning a visual company doesn't qualify for anything else but owning a visual company.

Dchild wrote:If you have Maxforlive then definitely check out this modular set of tools

http://fabriziopoce.com/max.html

Oh and here's is great tutorial by fabrizio

http://vimeo.com/33503662

Thanks, great video! It's cool that he also uses GPU instead of CPU.
Acually using the GPU should give you a boost in performance.
Do you know of similar programs that take advantage of the GPU?
Flash doesnt use the GPU very efficiently (if at all), I guess.

There is no easy way. You basically at this point in time cannot do what you want while meeting all the criteria you mentioned. If you want to do live (meaning LIVE - as in every parameter at your finger tips and the ability to go somewhere new every time) then you'll need processing, jitter, vvvv, or QC - all of which do not have "nice" UIs (though you create your own eventually - which will only be as nice as your programming skills). I use vvvv (which is free), controlled via MIDI from TouchOSC - > lovvvve it, but it's no walk in the park - I often want to bang my head against the wall but it's worth it.

Personally I'm grateful this kind of thing is so difficult. At this point 90% of the VJs I see are simply playing static clips with Resolume and it is very...uninspiring. I think you should just say f*ck it, and meet the difficulty required head-on. "If it was that easy it wouldn't be worth it".

vvvv can also do gpu stuff

...as can processing

Thanks, guys.
Yeah it seems there is no demand for UI, because there are too few people that actually do this kind of stuff.
I can alter some processing-examples and have fun with that, but don't have the time to really dive into programming my own stuff.

Birthday Boy, can you show me some footage of your vvvv-visuals?

You have a PC, but on Mac VDMX and Quartz Composer is a really mean combo. VDMX does all the mixing side of things, while Quartz is the backend and can provide the generative side of what you want for your vectors. VDMX is and has been in beta for along time tho, and is constantly changing. Quartz, on the other hand, is otherwise lingering as a modern technology and may or may not see support with future iterations of OSX. It's a gamble for now, but a very good one. If you want to dive right into the deep end and have a bitchin graphics card - look into Touch Designer - it's pretty much PC only - and can do anything.

Holy shit! i need to have a look at that touch desinger thing!
If it really is as powerful, as it seems to be, i'm going windows! )
Thanks for the hint!

Great thread guys, this has pointed me toward some stuff I didn't know existed. Thanks.

#1thelark wrote:Thanks, guys.
Yeah it seems there is no demand for UI, because there are too few people that actually do this kind of stuff.
I can alter some processing-examples and have fun with that, but don't have the time to really dive into programming my own stuff.

Birthday Boy, can you show me some footage of your vvvv-visuals?

as requested. btw - this was done without a controller, which wasn't working at the time so I had to make do with just my mouse. Not to make excuses but this is like 10% of what I'm capable of doing live.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wlVsffoFm4

that was an actual live performance. I also do more Midi-synced stuff with Live that can be seen here - http://www.lokua.net/videos.html