Investments for beginners

[annaratjik]

Hey. I have been interested in learning Vjing for a while and starting my animation bachelor in college this year I got an introduction to Resolume. We have pretty good computers at our animation department, so I'm going to play around with Arena there before I give up my money and soul to it.

Locally, there isn't too many places to perform, but from previous students I've heard the places here are pretty welcoming for VJ's. Because the town is so ridiculously small it'll be a great place for a beginner, I think. My home town, which has a bigger night life, might be even more welcoming to VJ's - knowing I've never heard of any local VJ's.

Well, my questions are: Keeping in mind this will for me just be an experimental, hobby sort of thing to broaden my experience at campus, how much should I have to spend on equipment as a beginner? Is using the free trial version at dance bar gig a definite bummer?
I'll try to read upon what sort of things I'll need myself, but some tips and recommendations would be fantastic Thanks a lot!! - Anna

Edit:
ALSO, forgot to add. I only have a Macbook Air - which I read isn't suitable to run the software. Recommend a Macbook Pro or a PC? And how expensive do I have to go to run it smoothly?

[philmcrackin]

It depends on what you're going to be doing with the software. Are you just playing back a few layers of video clips that you rendered on your campuses computers or are you looking to use lots of layers and effects? You'll need a more power graphics card for the latter. What resolution are you going to be outputting from your laptop? For example 720p or 1080p? You'll need a more powerful graphics card for 1080p.

What's most important about the laptop is that it has a discrete graphics card, e.g. AMD Radeon or Nvidia Geforce card. If a laptop computer only has an integrated card e.g. Intel HD graphics or Intel Iris graphics, you are not going to get very good performance since Resolume utilizes the GPU for rendering and a discrete card is much better than an integrated graphics card. Also the other important thing for smooth playback is a solid state hard drive. If a PC laptop has a magnetic drive, you can always swap it out for a SSD drive or add an extra hard drive caddy in place of the DVD-rom drive.

Resolume offers discounts for students but using the demo version isn't that big of a deal in a club.

[Oaktown]

Resolume offers discounts for students but using the demo version isn't that big of a deal in a club.

I would think that no one would want to run the demo in a club setting unless you want your first night to be your last night in that club. Who'd want to see the Resolume logo randomly fly through their comp. Also, that completely prevents you from using any audio output because the last thing you want to hear in a club is that robotic voice coming up in the speakers when people are dancing!

Avenue is probably what you need as a beginner VJ and the student version is very reasonably priced. I'm sure you could do get started with a friend's laptop that has a discreet GPU. Just buy them a couple drinks!