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Sunday, February 12, 2006

The VJ suite



www.vjculture.com
Above is a shot of the VJ suite on stage. Sean and I have two Edirol V4 mixers that lead into Edirol's new HD video mixer. We use the HD mixer so we can upscale the V4 signal to HD and then send it out to the 8 projectors via VGA to CAT5 and back to VGA at the projectors.
At my station I am running Motion Dive on one mac and Arkaos on a PC and a 17" Mac. On top of the rackmount case I have an Edirol CG-8. I'm running a Edirol PR-80 media server via firewire into the two Arkaos programs.
On Sean's station he has 3 DVD players, Motion Dive. On the HD Mixer we have the two sub mixers, a live camera and the PR-80 coming in the s-video port. All this gets upscaled to the HD bus and out to the projectors.
On top on all this is the MIDI routing. In the photo above you and see an Edirol UM-550 MIDI matrix router.
I'm taking feeds in from Chris who is triggering audio samples from the web collaborators via Ableton Live. The MIDI is then routed into the matrix router and sent to Motion Dive and Arkaos. It triggers a video sample of the web collaborators performing in front of a camera. In some cases we shot the musicians in advance in front of a green screen. The other musicians sent the audio/video files in to us via the web.
On the MIDI matrix router I am also receiving triggers from the drummer (Ed) who is using a Drum Kat to send the signal.
On my end of things I've routed with MIDI all the video mixers via V-link so I can control the "Fade to Black" from one V4.
I'm using a UC-33 MIDI controller to control, Arkaos on two laptops and at the sometime controlling the Edirol PR-80.
To complicate things even more we have NBC providing us footage from the day before highlights. I get the footage in the early afternoon and start cutting the video so we have a few clips added to our show each night.
The show then gets recorded to hard disk via the JVC 3 in 1 recorder and then we burn Multiple copies of the performance for the guest performers.
The white tarp surrounding the stage is to keep the stage warm until 15 minutes before the show starts. Then we left the tarps and the 20F. degree cold air comes rushing in. It's cold and I can't mix with gloves on. I have to be able to use the trackpad on the laptops and they are sensitive through the gloves.

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