I’ve done a few live VJ sets, busking with VDMX6 and an APC40. So far so good. Everything works great. However, I’m running into a problem that probably has a really simple solution, but I’m just not seeing how to go about it.
In short, I use a 2 channel mixer plugin tied to the crossfader of the APC40 to mix between an underlay layer and overlay layer. And I have 5 buttons on the APC40 that I use to change blend modes between things like multiply, dodge, addition etc.
The problem is sometimes a blend mode looks terrible and I’d like to preview it before it’s shown on the main screen.
I’ve gone through some iterations of layers, preview windows, and the like, and I haven’t yet found a way to preview, say a permanent 50% mix of underlay/overlay layers, that I can view on the computer screen before actually doing a crossfade on the main display.
I’m about to try using Syphon to route stuff around and see if I can get something going, but before I did thought I’d ask the crew here.
Thanks Jernej. I’m glad to see I wasn’t just missing something obvious. I think one of the more important aspects of your approach that I wasn’t familiar with was the concept of hidden layers. That seems like it opens up a lot of options.
(The “Milk” layers are Milkdrop sources used as backdrops as well)
Then I have a fullscreen solid color plate above these, so they aren’t visible in the final output, then, above that I have a single “live output” layer that sources from a very basic Vuo composition that takes the COMP_A and COMP_B inputs and mixes them to one output, based on a slider (effectively reimplementing the two channel mixer but actually mixing the two laters)
Effectively it has two outputs, one where you can see both A and B side by side, and one where you can take the mixed output. This mixed output is used as the source of the “live output” layer, and that’s what is seen on the main output.
Using presets and clever UI layout I have these two comps laid out in rows with a big red tally indication so I know which one is currently being shown:
This is interesting, thanks for reviving the thread too as I still haven’t come up with a better setup.
What I don’t yet understand with your setup though, is how do you preview blend modes prior to showing live? Is it that you do that with the top/bottom layers within each comp? So for instance if Comp A is showing live, you do a blend mode on Comp B, find the right one that works, then do a crossfade to B? (and then do the same with A before crossfading back?)
If so, I think that could work quite well, though you may lose some of the fun lo-fi glitchiness you get of crossfading with blends on top. But might be worth the drawback.
If I’m understanding this setup correctly, then what does the Vuo mixer comp give you that the native two channel mixer doesn’t offer?
You guessed right, I will play with things on comp B while stuff on comp A is live, there’s a bit of manual duplication, or you can use the same layers as a sources inside comp A and B… personally I tend to set up entirely different “scenes” on the opposite composition while the other is live to prep for changes the DJ might introduce (I do a lot of live improv with my rig!)
As for the cross-fade: you can also just slam the value from 0 to 1 and get an instant “cut” rather than a cross-fade, I mapped a cut to a button on my MIDI controller so I can swap on beat, etc.
The Vuo cross-fader actually takes in the compositions as input video sources, and mixes them, outputting to the live output layer. This is different than the two channel mixer built into VDMX, since that actually just affects the opacity of two layers. The Vuo composition lets you also tap a preview of two sources inside a single preview window, something else you can’t do with VDMX natively.
You would potentially be able to make this work with just the two channel mixer by laying two outputs that comp A and comp B send to, but the Vuo composition makes it feel like a whole plugin, and only uses one layer
