Using Actual Video

[DataPhreak]

It seems like universally, everyone mixes geometric animations, computer generated music visualizations, and occasionally, video of someone dancing. While this is very clean looking and is easy to match to the music and lighting, I prefer to use actual video and or cartoons, anime, music videos, etc.

I understand there are concerns of copyright. But when you're matching it to the music, blending it with other video, morphing it, does it not fall under the same fair use laws that protect DJs when they sample audio from commercial sources?

Are there other reasons you don't use regular video? Technical or visual considerations? Dictation by venue?

[flik]

You can try https://archive.org/details/movies for tons of public domain movies and videos. Then you have no worries over usage.

[DHoude]

There are several Music Video DJ pools too. I have been a customer on VJ-Pro for years. They are all licensed for public performance (non broadcast) as long as your venue pays ASCAP, BMI and SESAC royalty fees..

[DataPhreak]

Great considerations on the copyright front. Still, at the biggest parties, most of the time all I see on the screens are osciliscope/waveform rendered graphics, with maybe a mirror effect. Ususally, there'll be some particle generation in the back ground, etc. From a frame rate and pixelation perspective, you will naturally get better results from a procedurally generated source than from a video. But it just looks so generic though. Half of the stuff I see looks like a suped up version of the old school WinAmp plug ins. Not to knock winamp plugins, I got my first gig showing a resident how to work winamp manually. Sure, flat geometric visualizations are great for asymmetric projection mapped screens like what TAS does. (I want to lick his brain) but for flat square screens, it seems lazy to me. Other than manipulating blending and effects, there's not really any jockeying being done. To me, that's like a DJ that wipes back and forth between two auto-beatmatched tracks and just adds phasers, echo, or other effects.