i’ve been mixing visuals and music for a couple months now, nothing professional, just messing around at home. I figured out a pretty easy work flow to get you up and running mixing music and visuals at the same time.
Things you’ll need: (this is based off of what I have for equipment)
- a projector
- macbook pro
- traktor software (dj)
- vestax vci 100
- modul8 software (vj)
So how it works basically is, you’ll have two programs running - Traktor and Modul8.
Quite a few VJ softwares out there almost emulate a DJ mixer style feel. Modul8 in this case sorta does.
So what you do is you basically set up or ‘midi learn’ your Modul8 to what you normally use in traktor.
In modul8 there are a number of things you could do to screw around with video. such as change colors / red / green / blue …cross fade between clips…flip vertical horizontal…strobe or flash video…
A basic set up would look like this…
midi map your crossfader in modul8 to your crossfader in the vci-100. So now, when you crossfade between songs, you can crossfade between videos.
You can also take your lo’s hi’s and mid’s and map those to RGB (red green blue) channels, so when you cut out your low’s on a track, you could essentially turn your video to go all tinted green.
This is just a few possibilities of what you can set your midi maps to.
Another good idea which I’ve incorporated is that in the modul8 software, you can download modules or extensions other users have developed. There are modules that let you select your video clips from your video clip bank.
What Ive done was midi map my track selection buttons in traktor/vci-100 (up/down) – and mapped that to the ‘select video buttons’ - what this does is now when I’m searching for tracks clicking up or down…its selecting randomly in my video clip bank to load into the VJ software.
I’ve always wanted to do an AV set live, but couldnt find a software that would work in tune with traktor that does video…(without having to shell out $3000+ for dvj decks)
Here’s a couple vids I’ve done VJ’ing. (before I got into all the DJ’ing side of things, I’m originally a multimedia/graphics designer)
These videos don’t show how traktor and modul8 synced together…its rather 2 computers 2 people, my friend is on Traktor, and im controlling the visuals
A vj set I did after I compiled a mix in ableton. - this was done in the Onyx VJ software
http://www.nickylawskensino.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3&Itemid=1
some good forums to learn more about vj’ing
garagecube.com (modul8 website)
