We already talked about YroYto and his work at “Les pixels transversaux” or the Visionsonic AV festival. Yro has a new project with Transforma called Asynthome, an Audio-Visual live performance inviting “the audience into its very own creation process”.

The video setup involves live camera feeds and a VJX16-4 video mixer controlled from MIDI from Ableton Live. For this performance, Yro developed some ‘Max for Live’ objects so the MIDI control for the VJX16-4 integrates nicely into Live. The good news is that these guys were enough to share one of them with us: the module controlling the color effects (RGB Balance and Offset, and the Brightness-Contrast -Saturation) and the Crop.

Here is how it looks like in Ableton Live:

The module can be downloaded here.

The performance will be presented during the Nemo Festival in Paris the 9th April. Watch their video teaser:

Thank you guys!

Recently I had two matched projectors for a couple of hours, so I decided to try and achieve a seamless scrolling effect with live camera sources.

Through luck rather than planning, all of my video cameras are from Sony, and they all have the same type of cable for composite analog-out. Looking for better quality, I picked up half a dozen of these replacement cables, which have both S-Video and Composite jacks. This allows me to send a single camera output to 2 separate layers, setting the stage for some multi-screen spanning.

The Setup

Put the VJX into Battle Mode (Menu > Video > Mixmode > Battle 2*2)
Set Outputs for separate projectors (Menu > Video > Outputs > Choose “Master 1″ for first projector, “Master 2″ for second)

Plug one output from each camera into each side of the mixer:
Camera 1:
Composite Output – Track 1, Input 1
S-Video Output – Track 3, Input 3
Camera 2:
Composite Output – Track 2, Input 1
S-Video Output – Track 4, Input 3
… and then hold down the “Input” button and select these inputs.
For each track in turn:
Enable Background Alpha
Enable Scroll FX

Midi Control

The VJX has a complete midi map, covering almost every function available (apart from saving and loading of presets). The VJX has a pretty intuitive control setup for the huge amount of options available, but it would be physically impossible to control independent parameters for 4 tracks concurrently, which is where external midi enters the picture.