I’m new to this world, but am very impressed with what VDMX can do. I’m trying to get a demo performance going, and I’ve managed to map clip triggers and parameter changes to a mid device. When switching between clips, it seems to take a few milliseconds for the particular fx to apply to the clip (e.g. kaleidoscope). I presume some of this is related to the limitations of the computer, but I’m on a top spec new iMac. Is there something that I need to do to avoid this, so I can get clean transitions between clips?
In your Button UI inspector, what settings do you have for triggering the effect and is there a threshold? Is your midi controller pressure sensitive? You can also leave an effect ON, and transition in and out of it with the Wet/Dry slider (at the top of the effect). Or if you want the trigger to be momentary, set the button to Val from Input:
Are you talking about clips (video files) loading or FX being applied to the video? I think you might be confusing the two, to me the issues sound like clip loading.
If it’s related to clip loading then have a read up on encoding and try HAP. Also have a think about clip resolution, a lot of people new to VJ work won’t realise that 320 × 240 (QVGA) was common as a standard resolution when digital mixing first appeared. Now 720 or 1080 would be common, 2k or 4k less so and most machines would struggle outputting 4k with multiple layers and FX.
As well as proper encoding you can also turn on Preload Media in the Media Bin options for really fast switching. But generally I would say that’s not necessary when using HAP or any other raw or optimised (uncompressed) formats.
For encoding I would recommend ff.Works, its a UI for FFmpeg and costs 20€ (ffworks.net). It has a lot of presets and supports HAP as well as a massive amount of the FFmpeg features built in.
A note on video formats: MPG files are super common but really won’t scrub well and won’t remember the last position when applying Movie Start Time. When VDMX plays MPG files it has to uncompress every frame before outputting, whereas HAP is an uncompressed and optimised file format designed for video scrubbing. The only situation I would use MPG is if I’m playing back a clients file and don’t have time to re-encode.
Thanks @2bitpunk, I’ve never heard of ff.Works myself, but I’ve been looking for a (better) future alternative to Adobe Media Encoder for some time. Back in the day it was FCP Compressor, and now Media Encoder (or even some homebrewed command line FFmpeg, but I’m a sucker for a batch queue and nice GUI).
ff.Works is a great UI, takes all the pain out of using FFmpeg in Terminal if you don’t know the commands. Also the presets are really useful for quick encoding for social networks. For me ff.works is an essential tool and something I use almost daily and a bargain at 20€
