Live Video Editing at Station Vu

Project Description

During summer, Station Vu in Montréal projects movies on a huge screen in a park that borders the St. Lawrence river. Appalaches, with whom I was playing guitar at the time, was invited to perform as an opening act for a movie, and to take advantage of the big canvas to project video during the performance.

I created a set of live video editing tools so that video projections could also be part of the band's live performance.

User Experience

Challenge

While the band performed, the video scenes would change as parts of the songs changed and evolve. Having a video play on its own would require the band to synchronize to the video, which would be too complicated. In order to achieve what was needed, someone had to be in control of a console

Investigation

While there are many software that allow for live video editing, the band had no budget to hire a professional VJ, or to buy software.

Additionally, if an amateur were to control live video editing, that person would have to be provided with a simplified interface, and a clear scenario to reduce complexity.

Solution

I created a Max patch which could be controlled with a MIDI interface, a physical controller with sliders, knobs, and buttons.

The show was set to last some 30 minutes. Each song was cut into its parts; intro, verse, transition, etc. A pool of video scenes was created for each song and part, and a scenario was loosely prepared with this in mind.

The editor was instructed to pull from a specific pool of video for a specific scene. The editing software allowed to change the playback speed, to switch scenes from within the pool, or to mix scenes.

Credits

• Music composed and performed by Appalaches
• Video scenes used for Spotari are taken from Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove
• Animations used for Nola are drawn by James Paterson
• Video scenes used for Soleicare are taken from Nankyoku Monogatari
• Live video editing performed by Jon Yu
• Photos by Sébastien Legault, Annie Fafard, and Jon Yu
• Performance filmed by Jon Yu
• Performance hosted by Station Vu on August 8th 2013