One of the biggest nights for live visual performers is New Years Eve and in particular there is responsibility in particular that can be unexpectedly tricky to get right. That is handling the countdown to midnight. Often it can mean coordinating with other performers or workers at the venue. Depending on what is required of you during the show there are a few different approaches you may want to take when setting up your projects. It also helps to have an idea in advance of what your options are for running a visual countdown.
Read MoreHow to Turn an Old Building into an Interactive Driving Range by Gabe Shaughnessy & Dan Cohen
For this guest tutorial we're joined by Gabe Shaughnessy of Lumenal Code for an in depth look at how to create a well executed one off event video event that involves substantial preproduction from storyboarding, to animation and fabrication, and final live performance:
“Red Bull Mural is a project that pairs an athlete with an artist in a unique collaboration. Red Bull asked New Creatures to create a psychedelic, immersive experience for pro golfer Rickie Fowler in Washington, DC’s historic Uline Arena. New Creatures asked Lumenal Code to provide a story, artwork, and animations, and then to create the interactive projection mapped targets and operate them during the event. ”
Read MoreExporting Motion projects as Hap Alpha movies to use with VDMX
While VDMX itself is an application for creating real-time visuals, eventually most VJs and other visual artists have some use for other types of video software such as non-linear editors (iMovie, FCP, Premiere) or motion graphics generators (Motion, After Effects) to create pre-made footage to use during performance.
In this tutorial we look at exporting movies from Apple Motion to use in VDMX and including the alpha channel by using the 'Hap Alpha' codec. The same basic idea can be used with other motion graphics software such as Adobe After Effects.
Read MoreConverting movies to the Hap video codec
Hap is a new video codec for Mac OS X that performs image decompression on a computer's video card, substantially reducing the CPU usage necessary to play back a movie- this is useful in situations where CPU power is a limiting factor, such as when working with high resolution movies.
In this tutorial we'll look at when it is appropriate to use Hap encoded files and how to convert movie files using the free Vidvox batch exporter utility, or your other favorite QuickTime enabled applications.
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