So my fellow VJ's, what should have been a very nice VJ'ing weekend turned out a little disastrous, to say the least...
I'll split this topic in three parts, first, what happened, then how my resolume is set up and in the end I'll tell you what I am using...
First, I had a 2 day gig in Arnhem, a 10.000 people packed hardstyle event where I did the mainstage together with my VJ buddy, he is using VDMX with no trouble, I stick to Arena with lots of trouble....
So the first issue came when mapping the 8 separate screens in arena, no biggie of course, I had the drawing from Pixelscreen and when your are used that 0,0 in the drawing actually means 0,0 plus the half of the screen resolution horizontal and vertical things couldn't be easier..wrong! Probably the fault from the LED supplier, but everything was 5 or 10 points/pixel different from the drawing, no problem of course, opening advanced output and mapping everything in place and shazam, it worked,until I clicked save&close, that made resolume stop, not once but like 16 times over and over again it stopped working and needed to be re-started...
Now I'm not the world's best VJ, but this is not something heavy in my opinion, this is easy peasy mapping with some slices and should not give any problems..but it did, over and over again, finally it worked and we could start doing what we came to do, rock the screens
Until resolume quited again, and with restarting it again using the advanced output caused it to crash and crash, with no clips selected, nothing playing and some sweet talking to my laptop it got running again and we finished of the first night.
So day2, Kingsday and again a sell out, same location, same LED, but different mapping, just two slices to cover everything instead of a lot of smaller onces and this seemed more stable, resolume did stop a few times, maybe once or twice or no more... which again shouldn't have happen, but okay, it worked....
Using the bigger slices showed something different and something that worried me very much.
Because of the music, hardstyle, everything was flashy and fast and I used a lot of FX, stripper, jitter, mirror, colorizing etc. and what I saw was that the quality of the image went down spectacular, not just a little, but a lot, shading, shadows, lines turning into blurs and more suffering
Now to be honest, black wasn't black, red was dull, but this could be the result of my VGA output to a V8 videomixer which went composite to the LS 150 processor from Pixelscreen and the rather old P16 screens which were used, so to figure this out I am going to try this at home with my buddy, trying to recreate the situation, but his output from VDMX, both converted from displayport to composite and into the V8 had a black that was black and bright red instead of the dull colors I was having, using the same visuals...
Furthermore he could alter the color, brightness and contrast settings on some kind of master output module, something resolume doesn't have...
So lucky me, around 8PM that night I wne ton to the last gig of the weekend, in a club, different music, just 2 small P8 screens and DVI in, this worked perfectly, black was black, colors bright, very bright and the slicing was just to put my screen into the smaller ones on stage and over the night from 12 until 5 resolume worked flawless...
So to put things in perspective, and hoping to learn more and more from you guys, here's the setup of my resolume..
It's a lot I know, I use standard 5 layers, with the 6th reserved for logo's and DJ names, mostly the layers are filled until column 40 or 50 or so, I have preprogrammed and mapped 21 effects and mostly everything is set to 1024x768, the fifth layer is reserved for the resolume built in stuff, lines, flashy bars, beat driven squares and crosses etc. the other 4 layers are filled with loops and here is where my buddy and I have a big discussion going, I carry with me around 9000 loops on my hard-drive, of course I don't use them all but they are there so in my mind, resolume just reads the clips who are loaded in the deck and the rest is ignored until I load them into a deck, where my buddy thinks resolume keeps scanning this collection of loops over and over again when the loops I use are needed to play and this would be so much that resolume decides to go f*ck yourself and quits
So am I pushing my machine to hard? Should I cut on the number of FX? Is there something I should do different? Of course all loops (well most of them) are in DXV and I use big folders, not 5 loops a folder but 40 or 80 or sometimes more but also sometimes just 6, is this something that drives resolume crazy?
One more thing, the FX I use are always on the whole composition, only the built in generated visuals use FX on the clip....
So until this it's about resolume, now after this problem, viewtopic.php?f=12&t=11024 , where I had problems with a stuttering preview, I took the big step forward and bought myself a brand new Macbook retina, selling a kidney, I could afford myself this setup;
And it's used solo for resolume, so there's some software, resolume of course and half the disk is filled with loops, and that's it, so the Friday and Saturday night I used an Apple converter from thunderbolt to VGA and Saturdaynight an Apple converter to DVI, I use a licenced Resolume Arena 4.1.8 and a Akai APC 40 as controller, the midi setup I use and the .AVC are copied from my windows machine since I wanted to have al my FX and the resolume generated visuals transfered from windows to my mac.
So here it is, my rant from this weekend, I was fairly disappointed to say the least about the performance and I really hope to get a shitload of input here that will get me in the right direction...
I know I push the machine hard, but after all it's a very very powerful computer and where my old setup (Asus G74) was getting rusty with the previewing etc, it was no problem to run resolume, cinema4D and after effects and photoshop at the same time, being on facebook and chatting on skype, so I had high hopes for the mac which are pretty much down the drain now...
PS; is it me, or is there no way to select multiple columns at once to remove them? Sometimes I load like 200 clips in a row and cut and paste them into place, something that also makes resolume crash, but then I end up with 50 used columns and 150 unused columns which I need to remove one by one...