There’s a new movement under way: one that’s been growing steadily over the last decade. For years you’ve seen it at concerts in large stadiums and at awards shows on TV, but now you’ll also find it in churches and corporate meetings. It’s a visual movement that communicates feelings, expresses emotions, and delivers powerful messages that are separate from the audio, but at the same time directly in sync with the audio. This VJ plays the images as if playing a musical instrument, often using a keyboard or midi controller to do it.

The technology making this possible is VJ software that allows for video clips to be triggered at the touch of a button and sent to multiple screens for public viewing. The clips are sometimes prerecorded and other times live feeds of the audience or what’s happening on stage. What separates this from the job of a regular video technician is that the content of the video clips is often created by the VJs themselves and that there’s no predefined order to when those clips will be played. The VJ is directly interacting with the musicians and “jamming” alongside with them, playing his visual keyboard as just another part of the band or as just another DJ rocking the crowd.

For those who use content creation software like Photoshop, After Effects, Illustrator, and Premiere, being a VJ provides a whole new outlet in which to show off their work and express themselves creatively. Helping to make that possible are three top-selling software packages that are built from the ground up to be used for live performance, whether onstage or from the back of a club. One of these apps just might be your next career.

ArKaos VJ 3.5 MIDI
The simplest of the VJ software family for a newbie to learn is probably ArKaos VJ 3.5 MIDI ($335 download; $359 CD; Mac and Windows). Like all VJ software, it can build a full performance using a few simple video loops, but ArKaos (www.arkaos.net) also allows you to alter them using more than 100 real-time effects. Its claim to fame is that it has one of the simplest interfaces and can be learned in only a few minutes with its drag-and-drop and key-punch functionality at all levels. It’s also the only software out of the three reviewed here that came with a printed user manual (215 pages).

ArKaos VJ supports resolutions up to 1920×1080 pixels, and version 3.5 now supports direct rendering to DV through FireWire. This is a great way to record your live performances. It also supports full midi suites, both onscreen and off, as well as music authoring applications such as Cubase, E-Magic, and ReWire. For those with a lighting background, there’s also a version of ArKaos available with full compatibility with the DMX protocol.

The Flash Text system can display onscreen messages using customizable Flash animations with editable text. Advanced transfer modes allow you to combine your visuals with masks (like Luma mattes and Chroma keying) to produce a number of different display effects. Besides the 60+ original ArKaos effects, the new version has added 42 FreeFrame effects. FreeFrame is an open-source, cross-platform, real-time video effects plug-in system designed for use in VJ applications. You can download even more effects from the FreeFrame website at http://freeframe.sourceforge.net.

Looking at the interface, you can tell that the company expects most of their users to perform using a midi keyboard. I’ve found that users either really love this or absolutely hate it. You may want to look at a couple of alternatives to the musical keyboard, like the M-Audio UC-33e midi controller or the Evolution X-Session midi control surface with crossfader.

Modul8 2.01
Swiss company garageCUBE makes one of the most powerful VJ software apps, called Modul8 (299 Euro [about $365]; Mac only). Unlike most of the other video mixers, Modul8 distinguishes itself by allowing for more creation and composition of your video sets, both before and during your live performances. Modul8 is not an A-to-B mixing type of video program: it’s much more like a live compositing video editor. It supports almost all QuickTime codecs, Flash animation, and image formats, and it works in full resolution with no scale-down happening behind the scenes. The output resolution can be in PAL, NTSC, SVGA, XGA, or higher. The same is true for your movies: not a single pixel is lost. Modul8 renders your media exactly as you’ve compressed it, with the maximum available quality and at highest possible resolution.

To reach this kind of performance, Modul8 pushes your hardware and the Mac OS to the limit. The full rendering is done through the GPU of your computer’s graphic card. The better your graphics card, the better your results will be. That’s why I recommend a dual-processor G5 desktop Mac instead of a PowerBook for use with Modul8. However, if you have to run it from a PowerBook, the company has added a number of features to lower the latency as much as possible at every level of the application. One of my favorites is that the movie swapping and looping of video clips are pre-buffered to avoid latency.

Modul8 is able to handle up to 10 different layers of media, with each one having its own settings. Layers can be re-ordered at any time with a simple drag-and-drop, and can also be grouped into two compositions, allowing you to work on one animation while you’re projecting another. Version 2.01 (the current version) includes an advanced transformer mechanism that allows the creation of 3D objects from your 2D media. There’s also a matrix mechanism for tiling your video source that supports 3D extrusion, a 3D particle engine designed for real-time manipulation, and a real-time patch system that lets you create complex dynamic 3D shapes by combining primitives, displacement mapping, and sound waves.

Version 2 integrates several new technologies to record a composition and to render it to a QuickTime movie. Specifically, it allows you to record hours of performance in an internal vectored format that takes no disk space or CPU time. Once the performance is finished, you can render your work several times using different codecs, frame rates, and resolutions without having to change anything in your original composition.

So what’s the downside of Modul8, you may ask? It’s by far the most complicated user interface of the three software packages we’re looking at. I would desperately like to have a DVD training video shipped with the product. Unfortunately, you don’t even get a manual—just a Help menu built into the program and a forum on the garageCUBE website (www.garagecube.com/modul8). The power of this program is also its biggest problem. It even has an integrated programming environment that allows you write Python scripts straight from inside of the application! For the majority of us who got into design so we wouldn’t have to learn programming, Modul8 will require a major commitment of learning time before we will be comfortable enough to use for a live performance.

Union 1.5
Livid Instruments makes my personal favorite of the three software applications; a product called Union ($299; Mac only [a Windows version is due sometime in 2005]). And just like its name, I think it’s the best union of both a technically powerful program and an easy-to-use interface for live performance. Union does the best job of differentiating between an artist and a technician. Union wants to set free the artist in you by providing an interface geared less toward preproduction and more toward live on-stage performance.

To musicians, phrases like “four effects layers per channel,” “large clip bank,” “integrated MIDI templates,” “effects triggers,” “clip sequencer,” and “easy-to-use LFOs” make them wonder if this is a new sampler or synthesizer. And in a way it is—only it’s for images. Livid’s video engine allows for instant manipulation and control of multimedia content while utilizing hundreds of effects. You can also do live feed manipulation, movie triggering, compositing, and countless other performance enhancing treatments to help you create an immersive multimedia performance. [Insert union_screen_big.jpg]
The developers of Union compare their software to that of a guitar. “Just as a guitar can be used for three-chord punk rock or a complex jazz improvisation, so can Union,” says Jay Smith, President of Livid Instruments. “You can make video with it very easily, but with a little practice and vision you can create some amazingly complex performances. We want the artist to be able to create their own voice with the software and make the software transparent in their performance.”

My favorite thing about the Union package is that it has a video tour on its website (http://lividinstruments.com). I would have liked a printed manual as well, but the video tour (that I could pause and rewind) was incredibly helpful at getting me up to speed on the interface in the shortest amount of time. The tour clearly shows how Union is meant for more real-time creation and improvisation, but that it has the advanced features and effects for almost any production use.

Coda
You can’t go wrong with any these VJ packages. Each of them has something special that will appeal to one person over another. So my advice is to download the demos from each of the websites and take them out for a spin. At the very least you’ll find a new avenue of creative expression and freedom. At the most, you’ll find a new career. Go be creative!