Hints & Tips

A post by Guest Author VJ Ecin (Ben Guerrette), find more about him at the end of this article.. As promised, here’s the first in a series of tutorials showing how to take advantage of the Flash capabilities within ArKaos GrandVJ. Note that it will also work for NuVJand MediaMaster since the variables are the same. In this tutorial I’ll explain how to tap into the EQ data to create some simple audio-reactive animations. We’ll be using some basic ActionScript 2.0 for the inexperienced Flash programmer. I won’t go into much detail on the how the code works but it should be enough of an introduction to allow some experimentation in creating new content for your VJ arsenal.

With GrandVJ, it is possible to import and export template and share controller mappings with your friends. Since it’s a handy feature but that the process is not totally obvious (although documented :), we’ll recap quickly here how to do:

When your frame rate goes down, and the video starts lagging, it is important to be able to analyse where it can come from. Today we’re going to look at some information we can use to troubleshoot this. Roughly, the way our application works is the following: at each pass, we read  a video frame from the disk if needed, decode it and then send it to the GPU (the Graphic card’s CPU) together with all blending and effect operations. Then we ask the graphic card to flush all operations (that is actually processing all pending graphical instructions) and present it to the display. If you look at the bottom of the user interface window in either NuVJ, GrandVJ or MediaMaster, you will notice that there are two numbers constantly updated. Something like: Graph: 400.00 Total: 60.00 These numbers indicate the speed at which the engine does its rendering.