Tips & Tricks #12: Logos In The Grid

In this tutorial, we will show you how you can overlay a logo on your visuals using a video grid. VidJam already has a built-in logo player to automate this task. You can access it by visiting the logos and branding panel in preferences. Here, you can specify a folder that contains logo images or videos. VidJam will pick a random image from that folder and overlay it over your visuals whenever you click on the “jump to logos” button. Alternatively, you can have the logo player automatically display a logo at periodic intervals. This is great if you want a hands-off approach, but if you want more control, you can use a video layer. Rather than Vid Jam randomly selecting an image or video, you can choose specific ones to display at any time. This also allows you to utilize various blending modes and precisely adjust the fade-in and fade-out times, as well as the layer's position in the stack. Let me walk you through setting this up. I'll begin by creating a new video grid. Since I haven't added my logos to Vid Jam's media manager, I'll navigate directly to the folders containing my logos. I plan to load all images in this folder, so I'll select them all with the Control A keyboard shortcut and then hit ok. I can click on any logo, and it will activate it. By default, the blending mode is set to overlay, and while this does look ok with this logo, I'm going to change it to alpha since this logo contains alpha information. Next, I'll adjust the logo's scale and position to fit neatly in a corner. I can do this by switching to the masking controls and clicking the transform edit button. This brings up a mesh overlay for easy adjustments. Once positioned correctly, I'll exit the transform edit mode. Now, I don't want the logo to appear suddenly; I want it to fade gradually in and out. I'll go to the envelope settings and increase the attack, which will make it fade in gradually. Ok that's better, now I'll adjust the release a bit to change the fade out. The envelope is initially in toggle mode, enabling manual on-off control of the image cell. However, for instances where I want the image to display briefly without manual intervention to turn it off, I can switch the setting to play once. Then, by increasing the hold time, the image will remain visible for a few seconds before automatically fading out. While I'm using a simple fade transition, VidJam supports various transitions for different looks. Lastly, I'll make the logo easily accessible by mapping it to a physical device. This can be done through Vid jam's manual mapping mode or by automatically assigning the whole grid to a keyboard, MIDI device, or Stream Deck. This makes displaying my logo during a performance as easy as pressing a button.