Resolume Forum

Hi everyone

am a newbie to this forum and the entire VJ art.

I am basically a solo musician using Ableton Live as my DAW/Sequencer along with several hardware. After doing a few live shows i realized it would make better impact to combine visuals with music. With that aim i have started preparing a basic roster of theme based video clips and have decided to go with Resolume (over Livid DNA and Arkaoss) as my main visual workstation for now as with my base knowledge all i am looking for is to trigger and manipulate clips/vidoeos. A few answers and advice I am seeking:

1. I have seen videos with ability to trigger clips on resolume through ableton live- Is this an ideal set up for live performance and any practical advise on instability or other issues to watch out for? My lap top is windows based i fairly decent on processor (dual core) , HDD (SSD) and graphics card (radeon 2000 HD series)
2. I am looking at investing in the matrox dual head to go , to drive two projectors . Any views on this?
3. What would be the desired and cost effective footage resolution i should go for ? I am looking at buying some non HD footage/clips

From a future upgrade stand point, what would be a good hardware/software combo VJ Rig- something cost effective and value for money.

thanks in advance

1. I would recommend running a separate VJ laptop, install the RTPMidi on both of them and then hook them up together using an Ethernet cable, then you can tell Ableton to send midi data to the other computer to trigger the clips. What you want too look for in a Laptop is one with a good graphics card, Buy a used laptop if you're looking to save money. My buddy bought his Elitebook for $250 off Craigslist. You should put an SSD in the laptop too for the best performance.

2. DualHead2Go works great, lots of people on here use them. If you're using the DP edition, get the Display Port to DVI adapters and then buy a DVI to HDMI cable from monoprice for the best video quality. Don't use VGA cables.

3. The resolution of your footage should ideally match the native resolution of the projectors that you're using. If you're playing small venues, I highly recommend using an Ultra Short Throw projector as they can be set up like 2-3 feet from the screen. If you're not looking to spend that much on a projector, the Benq MX880UST is good and you can pick them up cheap Refurbished http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid ... -R&cat=CON. If you got money to burn the NEC NP-U310W is really nice, it's brighter (3100 lumens vs 2500 for the Benq) and it's native resolution is WXGA (1280 x 800) 16:10 widescreen versus 1024 x 768 4:3 aspect ratio for the Benq. I used the Benq for a show and it was plenty bright for the bar we played at.

When you re-encode footage to DXV (Which you should do to get the best performance out of Resolume) in Mpeg Streamclip or Adobe Premiere, You should change the resolution of the footage to match that of the projector you're using for the best performance in Resolume.

You can see what graphics card Resolume is using by going to Output -> Show display and slice info.

Although I hate to potentially derail a thread of what is very solid advice, this little part is not necessarily true. This name is what the system has assigned to the card, and not necessarily the card it is currently using. The only way to check that, is to look in the log and check for the main OpenGL renderer. There's some screenshots of what to look for in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=10300&p=40663#p40306

But all this is mostly just being pedantic, and shouldn't stand in the way of making an awesome AV set with the good advice given.

Thanks very much, will consider all the inputs. One last question is can you manually change the GPU assignment for resolume to ensure it uses the dedicated GPU and not the integrated Intel GPU?

In 99% of the cases you won't have to, it's handled automatically for you.

If you do find out via the log that Resolume is indeed using the wrong GPU, both AMD and Nvidia can be configured to include it in the 'apps to use with the powerful GPU' list.

goto10 wrote:If you do find out via the log that Resolume is indeed using the wrong GPU, both AMD and Nvidia can be configured to include it in the 'apps to use with the powerful GPU' list.

Edit: I'm an idiot, I checked the log and my laptop is indeed using the Nvidia GPU and not the Intel on my laptop.

goto10 wrote:In 99% of the cases you won't have to, it's handled automatically for you.

If you do find out via the log that Resolume is indeed using the wrong GPU, both AMD and Nvidia can be configured to include it in the 'apps to use with the powerful GPU' list.

How do you do this? i got a new LP with a GTX 765 GPU and Intel 4700Mq, but the log says it is using Intel HD 4600. How do i get resolume to use the GTX?

thanks

Hmm well I checked my laptops log and it uses the NVS 3100M, weird because my laptop has worse playback than my friends laptop, the laptops are identical in hardware except I have an SSD in my laptop and my friend doesn't. I guess i've been wrong about this the whole time. Anyway my log says this.

---Info main OpenGL renderer---
Vendor : NVIDIA Corporation
Model: NVS 3100M/PCIe/SSE2
OpenGL version: 3.3.0
OpenGL version short: 3.3
OpenGL shader language version: 3.30 NVIDIA via Cg compiler

As to how to configure Resolume to tell it to use the more powerful graphics card, take a look at the screenshot below. Also it helps to make sure you have the latest NVIDIA drivers as you'll get the best performance out of using those.