Hey look, it works.
OK what have we here. On the left is a new DELL, because the poor old Fujitsu music laptop died in agony trying to hold the entire performance in 2Gb of RAM*. So we have an i7 with 4Gb RAM and Ableton Live. Every single instrument used in the gig has a discrete channel, which makes this into an 86 channel mix. There isn’t a beep that doesn’t have a fader of its own. The channels are grouped by piece so I can hide and reveal the needed columns. I can’t use scenes at the top of the grid because they are shared over pieces, so the first action each time is to go down to the bottom of the screen, launch a scene that sets up the BPM, silences any stray tracks, and sends off a trigger to VDMX. Then I can come back up to steer events from there. Once I’m confident about the workflow I can assign a key command to the setup scenes and not have to jump around.
On the right hand side is my workplace Mac running VDMX. There’s a media grid there with copies of each of the full videos so I can work out (a) the offset for the start, (b) which codec I am going to use (c) how the latest beta of VDMX has changed dammit. Once I get the basics sorted out I can divide up the videos into events so I can retime them, which frankly I don’t really want to do, because of the chance of chasing one’s tail.
The two sync over a Max patch where the PC sends out on a virtual MIDI cable to the Mac. It works over my network, for the gig I’ll set up a direct cable. Probably running on two Macs would be easier, but I doubt I could find an i7 Mac laptop for $700 at JB HiFi.
Codecs: the videos are being pulled off an external FW800 drive. I was making them all Apple Intermediate Codec, but I think I’ll be using Avid codecs instead as I can make them on the rendering PC, and I’m totally sick of Apple’s proprietary codec lock in bullshit. (Avid codecs are available as open source). Motion JPEG also looks pretty good.
Definitely the most complex set up so far. There’s a ridiculous number of synthesizers, samplers and effects all patched up; Reaktor, several copies of Absnyth, Max4Live granulators and plenty of Operators – so quite a lot of stuff to show the kiddies!
Feeling a bit like bloody Tangerine Dream. Stewart will like that.
* The Fujitsu has been a trouper and has been on the road for five years now, always starts up, always glitches without a glitch. Built with love, if you have been to a show in the last few years you’ve seen it working. It’s going to be my study machine now, bought it a copy of Office ($25 for academics) and Opus Creator. Happy retirement!
