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Video Scratching Goes Mainstream
Boomzilla writes "Pioneer has released
a digital
audio and video turntable (the DVJ-X1), which allows you to manipulate and
playback synchronized digital audio and video. You can manipulate DVD visuals in
the same way as you would music i.e. real-time digital video scratches, loops
and instant cues. The video and audio streams will stay in sync, even when
they're being reversed and pitched. I guess this is the logical, commercialized
version of that which has been
done before.
It's being
shown at CES, and there are several pictures on the official Pioneer site."
You are very good.. at turning me on
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We could already do basically the same kind of thing with iMovie, although with more of a workspace interface, but it was still nice and cheap.
Still, a scrub machine for the masses. Could make for some interesting deejay team competitions; visuals used to be automated. It's nice to see a more hands-on approach to a technology we've otherwise left to the A/V club geeks.
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
Scratching and looping? Sounds exactly like "Max Headroom" from the early 80s!
Not only has he already re-edited his own stuff, imagine what he can do with DVD's of other people's movies!!! He'll frickin' P-Diddy his way back into the mainstream with remixes of The Sound of Music, Casablanca, and The Godfather.
It's not copyright infringement, it's sampling!!! Now a "meesa jar jar binks" is just about the same as an "uh huh yeah!"
I like the Final Scratch approach. Just put a dummy encoded record on the turntable and then map any content (mp3) to it spatially. the perfect input device.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
At least for my porn collection!
This thing looks awesome, any DJ would be drooling at the mouth over it. It gives them a chance to mix visuals as well as their turntabling. With a huge screen behind you and one of these babies you could mix your viinyl with some visuals. Its great to finally get something that is so hands on with video.
Hmm...
It has RAM, and a DVD drive. Therefore, it can be made to run Linux!
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Although I would love it to be cool video remix is just not that cool looking. People have been doing this for a long time with various systems and I have seen quite a few of them. I used to work for MTV back when they had a techno show (AMP) and they tried to mix video but it just didn't work. There was no way to match rythm and even if you could it just didn't look particularly intereting. It seemded like it would be cool and you wantedted it to be but it ended up have only slightly more novelty than Microsoft's clippy. I have also seen a few groups that tried it with more advance equipment in more recent years and it mad for a nice compliment to a music DJ but these guys used a bunch of short weird and distorted clips mixed with CG. It was cool but no one person could have done it. I am also not so sure scratching would go too well either. Mostly because one of the things about scratching is that music scratching is done by going back and forth over a sound thus creating a NEW rythm and tone. However, picturing someone going back and forth over video clips just conjures silly images that I would imagine could even be a little dizzying to watch. So while they might of solved some techinical hurdles I think the artistic side has a long way to come.
Actually I've found that doing porn really tends to not go over so well with most crowds. Instead I use a lot of kung-fu, anime, war shots, and old black and white films. Nuclear weapons test footage also works well. I add to that custom 3D renders and live effects, and get a show that most people like. I tend to do this while I am mixing live and let Geiss's Milkdrop run when I'm taking a break =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
A little history for you electronic arts folks who dig this stuff:
I did this same thing in 1989 using a Roland Alpha portable keyboard and MAX running on a Mac 2. Max was a great program for the Mac that let you graphically build a control system for any peripherals (almost like Labworks for MIDI/Appletalk). The scripte we wrote could queue video sequences by pressing a piano key, and you could scratch using the pitch wheel, turning it into a video jog wheel.
During the performance, three musicians would jam on midi instruments (drums, roland wind thingy and a guitar synth) and another program on MAX would improvise based on what we were playing. The video artist also stood on stage with the ROland Alpha, jamming with us and using a small monitor rather than facing the projection screen.
Technologically, it was HOT.
In practice, the music was a cacophony and the video didn't change fast enough to keep up.
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From the wired article:
Video scratching was pioneered by a U.S. multimedia crew called Emergency Broadcast Network in the late 1980s, and refined by Coldcut and Hex, a pair of U.K. collaborative multimedia producers and musicians.
Does anyone else remember EBN? They were sorta Negativland-ish music (later Negativland, that is... dispepsi-ish stuff that had a beat and wasn't as abstract as their earlier stuff) and had all these cool videos where they did video sampling.
Their live show was one of the coolest I've ever seen. They had three huge video screens behind the stage playing sampled video, and this this weird podium thing that had two arms... On the front of the arms were TVs with yet more sampled video, and then later in the show, they arms spun around and had lasers or something on the other side. This was a long time ago, so I don't remember exactly, but it was incredibly impressive. They had re-edited all this footage, so they had Connie Chung, Dan Rather, et al. saying "This is EBN Nightly News!" and stuff. They also had a real gun shooting blanks during "Shoot the Mac 10". I grabbed some of the bullets of the stage, and I think I still have them. Amazingly, they were just the opening act for Banco de Gaia, who I also like, but come on... Toby Marks (BdG) was just sitting at a mixing board. It didn't even compare.
You can find some of their videos around the net. We Will Rock You shows them re-working (elder) Bush speeches, similar to the Bushwhacked that's been floating around the net.
They also had this tricked out station wagon with a satellite dish and video monitors all up and down the roof. It looked pretty cool, though I only saw pictures, not the real thing.
Later I saw them in "concert" opening for someone else, and they just played a video. I don't even think there was anyone from EBN there. It was totally disappointing.
Coldcut and Hex are cool, too, but I've never seen a show like the EBN one since.
I've played with more than a few VeeJays in my time, there seems to be a huge range in the effort that the video people put in - some of them try to sync stuff up to the music, others just plug up a DVD player and let whatever they have play - usually hentai porn. Really the audio needs to be syncrhonised to the music activity.
n eeds the XviD codec)
I've been messing around with video for a long time, but I'm still really a DJ at heart, I figure that a good audio video show needs at least 2 people with one DJ + One Video performer. The DJ needs a mixer which can send MIDI events from it's knobs and faders allwing the videographer to slave effects and synchronise them to what the DJ is doing. Problem is any mixer which sends midi events is just plain lousy for DJ'ing right now.
Anyway, I figured that most Promoters these days just don't listen to mix CD's for very long, so I've started to work on the video approach to complement my demo packs - here's a little one I'm working on right now.
http://www.radiodmz.com/radiodmz_trailer.avi
(
2 minutes of fast mixing and video effects - more of a commercial than a demo, but it's definately a step up from teh average video artist who plays Hentai porn over my DJ sets.....
A couple of years ago a friend of mine went to a weird multimedia show at a club where they hung sheets up on the wall and did live video/music mixing. He bought their CD which had video mixes on it for about half the songs, I think.
Anyway they were called Emergency Broadcast Network. The album was Telecommunications Breakdown and it used clips from news broadcasts and infomercials. There's a very small clip from one of the songs one that album here. There also some better resolution clips of some of their other songs here, and a better resolution download of "Rock This Base" here. I don't think any of those sons are as good as the stuff on Telecommunications Breakdown, but check it out, I'm not sure if that album is still available anywhere right now.
Yeah, EBN were an amazing band pioneering all this kind of stuff, and still going sadly unrecognised to this day ( tip: Telecommunications Breakdown is probably one of the best albums of the 90's, and had all this k00l multimedia shit bundled with it too ).
The swinging apparatus you described was also at some points mounted on the station wagon - it can be seen configured like this in the documentary Sonic Outlaws, which is awesome, and first turned me on to EBN, Negativland and that style of music in general. Anyone with an interest in fair use rights should view this documentary, as it features extensive coverage of the Island Records / Negativland lawsuit.
YLFIP.S. Am very jealous you were lucky enough to see them live.
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
Let's see... LP's operate at 33.3 RPM.
:-)
DVD's rotate at 1400+ RPM.
I can picture earnest, stern-faced VJ's sucking on burnt fingertips.
ok :)) ;)
its dj Q-bert not Quick, the rooster not the bunny, and he is considered the best DJ in the world which, when you know about is career, is very hard to argue with.
Wavetwister was entirely made out of skratches, the sounds, soundtracks and dialogues, not the video, it is built like it but isn't. And, well, yeah, probably that being stoned would help endure it but even if I'm a skratch whore I didn't appreciate.
The fact that you know about this movie is interesting though, it's nice to see a non-skratcher being aware of it...