What would be the best way to work with a huge media library? Above 10k clips?
Is there a way to force VDMX not to load all of them at start? Huge media libraries take long time to 10+ min to load upon opening a VDMX project. Even on a Mac Studio.
Load the project and walk away! 
When you launch the project, VDMX is checking to make sure the media is there and that there are thumbnails associated with it.
There is no current option that I’m aware of for VDMX to skip verifying that your media exists.
There’s talks about overhauling the file loading for a future version, but nothing else to address your problem now.
I’ve heard of some users duplicating their VDMX application on the same machine and loading one while using another (if your machine can handle it).
I would also recommend your 10k+ clips being on an extremely fast SSD or multiple fast SSDs to speed up the process. If your media is on a slow external hard drive it will take more time to verify the files.
Yeah, so far we have worked with some less files (6k) but would love to move to something like 30k+ clips or even more. The archive is growing and it would be great to have as many clips as possible.
That was indeed our solution to just let it do its thing, but we have noticed that sometimes it woulf hang during this operation. Files on an external T9 SSD.
We would be very interested into any improvments regarding the loading of files. If the team need anyone to validate or explain the use case, I would be glad to help.
Sure, tell us more about your project and how you are using VDMX!
It’s an art project that, in short, deals with our relation to violent imagery. More about the concept and the wider scope of it can be found on the website PURGATORY EDIT. The project was part of transmediale in January 2025, so it already got some attention (transmediale).
The project itself is divided into a few segments: the archive, the cyberperformance and research. The display of the archive has since been done with some custom code made by our programmer. It still needs some refining, but that is being handled.
The cyberperformace is where VDMX is used. This part uses the archive as a basis and VDMX with VUO and EMOTIV epocX as a sort of controller. Basically, we have created a semi-automated experience that is driven by the participant’s emotional state. EPOC X provides us with real-time data from the participant and is then channelled into VDMX as BCI controls. VDMX, with the addition of custom VUO plugins, then controls the experience and will display different footage according to the participant’s state.
(Should I go into more detail?)
We have so far been able to load around 6-7k clips of our footage in this experience as the database for the experience. Preferably, we would like to be able to use the entire archive, which now consists of approximately. 30k clips, but it is also still growing.
We have encountered a few key issues with the setup. I list them since some of them maybe could be mitigated.
One problem with using VDMX is the lock-in into the Apple ecosystem, which for the team itself isn’t such an issue; it’s more a problem of deployment, as renting Mac Studios for exhibitions is pretty steep. We were already contemplating using TouchDesigner as an alternative, but there has been a lot of development put towards VDMX already.
Another deployment issue is detecting all of the OSC connections we have, since there are a lot of them, and settings can’t be copied. Since we deploy the project on rented equipment, this is something that needs to be done manually every single time, and for some devices, this is a bit fiddly.
Maybe I’ll add here that the license management is also a bit of an issue, as we need to license the rented machine for the exhibition time and would love if there were an easier way to deassociate it afterwards.
There is probably some more minor stuff, but the project is pretty complex and has many parts so not all of them come to mind immediately.