Today, I have decided to realize a long cherished dream. What about making visuals for my music? It is not my intention to start vjing, I would like to create music videos. I have in mind abstract pictures, so processing computer graphics and effects should be the right starting point. The beginning is, as always, the most difficult, for that reason I would like to share my experiences by some posts and this one is the first.
What do I need for my first music video? Software is always a good answer, when you don’t know how to start.
My prefered DAW is Ableton Live. I would like to trigger, sync and control my visuals directly from Ableton. I read that VDMX 5 or Resolume could do this job. Both are known VJ software programs and regarded as equivalent. Don’t ask me my, I decided to use Resolume Avenue. I found out, that there is a full functional demo version. That is the way things should be.
Resolume supports Quartz composer patches. So I installed the Apple‘s Quartz composer. That was not so simple. You have to know that the Quartz composer is delivered as part of the Developer toolset for Graphics and Animation. I’m running Mac OS X 10.6.8, so I had to search a while on Apple’s developer website in order to find the right version. And I was forced to register myself as developer, but it’s free of charge. That means the second step is done.
The next step should be rendering the visuals to disk. Unfortunately, there are three possibilities. For a beginner like me it is hard to identify, which approach is the best for my purposes. Since Avenue 4 there is a internal recording function, but my first tests and studying the Resolume Forum raised doubts over this feature – in a later post more about that.
The second alternative, buy a HDMI video capture card – in order to get the file – is for a start to expensive. But there is a third solution: The open source software Syphon Recorder it records video from any Syphon supporting application. Unfortunately, the recorder is in beta state. And there are more risks: It’s not a good idea to record to disk while reading video during a performance from the disk, because frame dropping can happen. We will see how good it works.
But, how can Resolume stream into the recorder? The name of this solution is called Syphon. This free application routes the visual output of one program to another.
So, these are my first steps to make my first music video. For my taste there are to many application involved and chained. Wait and see how it works. To be continued.
alexander
Continue reading with Part #2.
hear and know 
Hello everyone, I have updated this entry, because there was a mistake regarding Avenue’s ability to render video directly to disk. I think, that are maybe good news.