Vidjam Tips & Tricks #7b : Going Live (Explanation)

In this video I'm going to show you how I set up Vidjam for the performance I did in my previous video if you haven't checked it out there's a link to it here:

https://youtu.be/dZlelB8RmmI

Vidjam can automatically go through a playlist and keep everything in sync with little to no interaction but for this setup, I wanted to have a more hands-on approach to triggering videos. I wanted to be able to trigger individual videos in any order at any time while keeping everything in sync. I'm syncing Vidjam to my groove box which is an Electron Syntakt but you can sync Vidjam to anything that sends out a clock signal - either via midi or Ableton link and this can come from an external hard work or it could be software like Traktor or Ableton. My Syntakt is hooked up to my computer via USB if you go to preferences and the MIDI section, you'll see all your available midi devices.

I'm going to enable midi note CC and clock for this video. I'm not using note or CC information but having an option available is nice. Notice how the clock LED is flashing? This means that the device is sending clock data that can be used by Vidjam. If this isn't flashing check your connections or device setup.

Next, let's go to the main interface and enable BPM mode. To test clock sync change the tempo on the source device. Vidjam's tempo should also change. Now that I'm receiving the clock I need to get things in phase by hitting CUE at the start of the bar. I could time this myself and manually hit CUE, but Vidjam automatically cues if it receives a start or play command via MIDI. You can hit CUE at any time if things get unaligned.

Now when I hit start on my Syntakt, Vidjam and everything lines up automatically as you can see. Everything is now time stretched and at this point, I could just let Vidjam do its thing and go through the playlist. As long as my duration is set to 4 bars the visuals will stay in sync but I also want to trigger random videos on the fly so I'll set a grid up for that.

First I'll add the grid layer and then I'll load it up with videos. What's in the current playlist is fine. If I expand the grid I can see all the videos I loaded. By default, the blending mode is set to screen which will make things semi-transparent. I don't want that so I'm going to change the blending mode to Alpha. These videos don't have any Alpha transparency information so they will just be fully opaque.

I want to make sure that only one video plays at a time so if I trigger a new video, the previous one will automatically stop so I'm going to change the polyphony to 1. Next I'm going to change the quantization to four bars. I set it to four bars because the patterns on my Syntakt are four bars long. When I trigger a pattern change on my Syntakt it waits until the end of the four-bar pattern before changing.

Vidjam is now quantized to four bars it'll also wait till the end of the four bars before triggering a video I really don't want to mess with a mouse during a live performance so I'm going to map the videos to an external control for easy triggering. You could use a keyboard, MIDI controller or a stream deck. I'm going to use a stream deck because I have one and it's pretty awesome to use so I'll just hit the stream deck button.

On the grid Vidjam automatically assigns the videos in the grid to the stream deck and generates video previews for every video on the fly - it's pretty slick. That's it so now I can trigger a pattern change on my Syntakt and then trigger a new video and at the end of four bars both will change at the exact same time.