Strangeloop enters the next part of his Hyperfields saga:


Get HyperFields 3 by Strangeloop *exclusively* from Resolume Footage.

Artifically Awake shines a light in the darkness:


Get NeonStructures by Artificially Awake from the Resolume shop.

And apparently Ablaze Visuals's computer is still glitching out. We hope it stays that way for a while ;)


Get NeoGlitch 2 by Ablaze Visuals *exclusively* from Resolume Footage.

A breath of fresh air in the saturated landscape of abstract EDM visuals, Ghostdad aka Ryan Sciaino caught our eye running the impressive visuals for Porter Robinson's Worlds tour. After spending a morning scouring the Interwebs for concert footage, we figured we just might as well get in touch with the legend himself.

Porter Robinson - Worlds still image courtesy of Invisible Light Network
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How did you get started in the VJ game? When did you discover Resolume?

I grew up playing music, and eventually DJing, and then creating visuals for my own music. At some point digging for records and samples turned into digging for found footage from VHS tapes and dollar store DVD's. That was around the time internet video was becoming popular too so I’d comb youtube and archive.org for weird stuff also.

I went to college for computer music and started learning max/msp while I was there. I built a video sampler I could use to switch through clips while DJing, but eventually amped it up to take it on the road with my band WIN WIN when we were doing a synched up DJ/VJ set. It was sort of a monster with cue points and BPM synch and effects so programming it got pretty intense!



When I started working with Porter I knew I needed something faster and easier to throw new content into on the fly. I was making lots of new looks to layer up with other clips and logos etc. It seemed like Resolume could handle anything I threw at it, and the triggering was the fastest I’d ever used, making it really fun to jam with.

Who are some of the artists that inspired you early on? Who is knocking your head back currently?

I listened to a lot of indie rock in high school and Cornelius was one of my favourite artists from Japan. I was lucky enough to see him do his Point show in NYC. I had never seen anything like it. I grew up watching music videos and even got into film and video art so I was used to seeing music and video together but never with live music in person like that. The content and degree of synch were incredible. It really blew my mind.



I’m a pretty big fan boy of artists who use multimedia in a conceptual way but also keep it really clean design wise like Ryoji Ikeda or Rafael Rozendaal. I’ve found more and more of my Vimeo likes being taken up by things that have been featured at http://ghosting.tv. And I definitely try to check out other artists when I’m at festivals too. I saw Bassnectar at Buku in New Orleans a few weeks ago and that was an awesome show.

You have a very varied but distinct style. From anime characters to mayan mysticism to abstract glitch to low-poly geometry to ponies, the list goes on and on. Where does it all come from? Didn't your mom tell you not to spend so much time on the internet?

No actually! We didn’t have the internet when I was growing up! We got a connection by the time I was in high school but it was maybe dial up speed at best. I’m a little older then what I consider to be the first real “internet generation” so when things got really high speed and dazzling it made me feel like a stranger in a strange land. There was so much amazing stuff happening on Tumblr or Vimeo or Second Life that I just wanted to check it all out. I get sucked down the rabbit hole online pretty easily, especially when I want to find out more about a genre or an artists or a meme. Some design trends I see online do remind me of things I grew up with like 8 bit video games or low poly 3D graphics so maybe that makes me think “I can do that!”

Visuals for DJ Tigerlily courtesy of Ryan

What caught my eye about the Porter Robinson 'Worlds' content is that it almost seems to be cinematic, in that it seems to be telling a story. Now our minds will always create a narrative with what we see, but is this an experience you consciously set out to create?

I think Porter’s goal is to invoke a feeling rather then tell a specific story. There’s definitely a tendency to connect what you’re seeing on the screen and create a story in your mind but that’s also the process that pulls you in and allows you to really feel it. In programming the show we give you every audio/video/lighting cue we can for the theme and timing and mood, and as a result I think the viewer gets to paint their own story and put themselves into it in the process.

Porter Robinson - Worlds still image courtesy of Invisible Light Network

The Worlds tour content is a collaborative effort, with you playing content created by a larger group of visual artists. Who are the people that you've been working with and how has it been working with them?

We worked with Invisible Light Network on the animated looks you see in the show. They’re based in NY also and had about 9 or 10 illustrators and animators working on their team. We were also able to grab additional content from some of Porter’s music videos like Flicker by Coyote Post.

I made content for the show as well and Porter was super in touch with everyone throughout the creation process. It was a lot of different footage to wrangle in Premiere, but I spent a week with Porter before the start of the Worlds tour where we really figured out the visual flow and style of the show while putting it all together. Porter has a tremendous amount of vision when it comes to his music which is totally inspiring.

So when looking at Youtube videos from your shows, I came across this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdotsHAzfVA. It looks like someone has been re-creating the content he saw at the show. How do you like them apples?

Yah we just saw that also! I think fans are dying to take home a piece of the show and it’s really cool they’d go so far as to recreate it from the bits of media that are floating around out there. I think that excitement starts with Porter’s music though since there are practically whole new versions of songs from the album in the live set.

Someone even put the entire set together from cell phone footage taken at shows with homemade recreations of the live music. Okay and here’s where it gets really crazy, someone even started building the live rig into a 3D game engine: https://youtu.be/kq3TcMxpcV4

The expanded presentation of Worlds as an album is what makes it special, but I think the live and communal aspects are still super important. Maybe someday we’ll all be able to log into an MMO and experience something similar but even that won’t be able to beat being there in person experiencing the show with other fans. My guess is there will be a complete version of the Worlds show you can watch at home someday but for now we try to keep certain things exclusive to the live set so you have to show up and get the full experience.


Hopefully this crowd video from the Youtubes captures some of that live experience!

Recently you've been playing with Unity to make realtime visuals. What's the main thing that makes realtime more fun than pre-rendered?

Render time is never fun and playing video games is always fun right? I’ve never been very patient with 3D software. A lot of the 3D stuff I work on has a lo-fi video game aesthetic as well so its sort of a no brainer to start throwing stuff into Unity. I jump in and out of Blender as well but I figured if I’m going to put my time into learning a 3D environment I wanted it to be real time.

Porter Robinson - Worlds still image courtesy of Ryan

Alex my band mate in WIN WIN is way more under hood with Blender and rendered some really weird stuff for our last music video. We really liked the effect of video footage height mapped to a mesh and the objects came out really smooth and organic looking, in part thanks to some render time:



What are the main stumbling blocks you run into when working in realtime as opposed to keyframe everything? What about the liberating moments of the freedom it offers?

Scripting is something I wrestle with. It’s great that objects can do what you want in real time but you still have to tell them what to do! The benefit of course being you can see those changes instantly, and tweak it endlessly.

Controlling things in real time keeps me a little more engaged and expressive. I think coming from a music background makes that important to me.

Visuals for DJ Tigerlily courtesy of Ryan

Do you like to control things in realtime during show? Or is the appeal more during the creative process?

It’s been great to get a chance to do both this year. Both VJing live but also spending time editing and programming a show I mean. There are always things that will look better when edited ahead of time, but even in a show like Worlds I leave myself a few things to do by hand. Sometimes that’s so I can follow what Porter’s doing live, but also for me to feel more involved in the performative aspect of the show. I still play guitar and keys so I don’t want to let go of that live aspect of playing visuals also like an instrument.

People seem to get really excited when discussing realtime vs rendered, some people even get militant about it. You seem to switch seamlessly between both. Do you think one or the other has more potential? Are they mutually exclusive? Where would you like to see visuals heading in the next five years?

Part of my thinking about learning realtime is definitely about the future. Ideally real time processing will catch up to how good it can look when rendering. I don’t mind it looking a little rough around the edges for now if I can play it to the beat.

Ryan is a prolific internet user, so you can catch him in a variety of digital media. Get started down the rabbit hole at his website: http://www.djghostdad.com/

Analog Recycling is back! The original pixel gangstaz return with a glorious set of retro-chic visuals. Motion blurred circular patterns with an almost tangible analog feel to them.
Reach for the lasers and party like it’s 1999.

Subconscious VJ Footage by Analog Recycling

Plug in to the PA and get connected to the sound. Forget about FFT and equalisers, this is the very definition of audio visualisation. These clips go up to 11.

AudioTech VJ Footage by Artificially Awake

Unleash your inner mad scientist with this amazing transparent machinery. Beautifully rendered, deliciously abstract but with a hint of a story, these clips will turn any audience into your zombie minions.

GlassMachines VJ Footage by BluElk

So, a few weeks ago we publicly released a new version of DXV, imaginatively called DXV3.0. It's a big improvement, and people love it. To make sure you get the best out of the codec, here's an upgrade guide.

First of all, DXV3 encoded movies will only work in Resolume 4.2 and above. In previous versions, Resolume will think they are very big and slow Quicktime files, and you will not have a good time. If you want to use DXV3, you're committed to Res 4.2.

DXV3.0 has 3 benefits: it's faster at high resolutions, files are generally smaller and it has a high quality option.

In general, we don't recommend re-encoding your entire library. Your old DXV2 files will play fine in Resolume 4.2, and you still get all the benefits of improved smoothness and bug fixes.

So there is no need to re-encode your entire DXV2 library. Especially do not re-encode your DXV2 files to DXV3 High Quality. Because you are rendering from a DXV2 source, any image artifacts are already rendered into the file. Your image quality is not improved at all, the only thing you get is bigger files that look exactly the same. And that's probably not what you want.

There are only three scenarios where we would advise re-encoding.
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1. A DXV encoded file shows a lot of banding on gradients. In this case you can re-encode to DXV3 High Quality. But you will need to have the original file as a uncompressed source or render it again straight from After Effects or Cinema4D. Of course, encoding the DXV2 source to DXV3 will show no improvements, because the banding is already rendered into the file.

Expect file size to double when encoding to DXV3 HQ. With great power comes great responsibility, so don't use High Quality as your default render setting. You'll run out of disk space real quick. Only use it on files that have visible artefacts when you render them to Normal Quality.

DXV3 Normal Quality is exactly the same image quality as DXV2. In other words, the picture quality will be exactly the same when rendering the same source file to DXV2 or to DXV3 Normal Quality.

2. You consistently scrape by on performance at high resolutions. We don't have exact figures yet, but DXV3 performs a LOT better when playing back 4K files. When you run 640x480 or 3 or 4 layers of 1080p, re-encoding won't do much for you, but when playing 4K, you can expect around a 30% improvement.

3. You cannot store all your files. DXV3 Normal Quality should be around 25% smaller than DXV2. This can vary considerably between different types of content. Minimal line content can go down as much as 50%, but highly detailed photographic content can stay around the same.

So, hopefully this clear things up a bit. If you have any questions, we'll be happy to answer them.

The releases are coming thick and fast, but you know we always keep an eye on quality. Wherever possible, the DXV3 encoded versions will come with alpha transparency, instead of a regular black background. That means that you can get both Electric and Synthesize with embedded alpha! Happy mixing times, oh yes.

Mathias Muller is king of the particles.


Get FluidMandalas from the Resolume label.

Raw Designs is back with more visual synthesis.


Get Synthesize 2 from the Resolume label.

And Artificially Awake doesn't sleep, he renders.


Get Electric from the Resolume label

///// So yeah, as most of you figured out, this was our April Fools' joke for 2015. See you next year, everyone! /////

One of the exciting new features in Res 4.2 is speech recognition. That’s right, you can now control Resolume just by saying what you want to do.

Check the video for an overview of the basic controls and a some hints on the new special effect commands.



Of course speech recognition needs a clear sound signal, so when using it in a club environment, it’s best to ask the DJ to turn the music down.

4.2 improves on the stuff that you use every day. The stuff that allows you to do your amazing shows on screens all across the globe. Because we know this is what matters to you most. A stable, fast and healthy application.

UPDATE: We have now also released maintenance version 4.2.1 which brings a number of bug fixes.


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New DXV 3 codec
Faster playback, smaller files, better image quality. What more can you ask from a codec?


For most content, file size has gone down 25% when using an alpha channel. Increased file size is no longer an excuse to render your footage without alpha. Luma keying is sooooo 2004.

There is now a high quality option in the codec for those cases where your subtle gradients were showing banding. Beware, with great power comes great responsibility: files are twice as big in this high quality mode. So use it where banding is an issue, not as the default render setting.

2 SMPTE Inputs
Because 2 is better than 1.


Workflow is improved with nice big buttons on the layers & clip panels and you’ll see the timecode on the toolbar so it’s there where you need it.

Smooother playback
This one caused quite a few grey hairs on our balding skulls ;-) It took us very long to find out where exactly things were going wrong, but we finally improved playback smoothness.

To get the best results, render your clips on 30fps (not 25), use the DXV codec, set the playback to timeline (not BPM) and remove audio from your clips.

Respect Bypass on slices with layer input
You can now set a slice to ignore the bypass of a layer. This way you can hide a layer from the composition but still use it in the advanced output.


So here it is. Our baby. Her name is Resolume 4.2, she’s stable, fast, beautiful, super healthy and ready to discover the world. Download.

[NEW] Two SMPTE inputs
[NEW] DXV 3.0 Codec
[NEW] Respect Bypass on slices with layer input
[NEW] Mac QuickLook plugin to show DXV thumbnails and previews in Finder
[NEW] Show Display Info has more detailed info
[NEW] Deck focus is the default focus instead of Layer
[NEW] Noisy Effect, Noisy Blend Mode, Grid Effect
[NEW] New demo footage deck

[FIXED] Improved playback smoothness
[FIXED] Alpha not recognised in Animation codec
[FIXED] Improved support for APC20 and APC40 MK2
[FIXED] Smpte offset spinner doesn't work on clip level
[FIXED] Sources and effects not loading
[FIXED] Crashes with some corrupt DXV files
[FIXED] Double clicking a comp file still opens the last loaded comp
[FIXED] Blackmagic mini monitor crashes Resolume
[FIXED] Flash crashes with autopilot
[FIXED] Problems with rendering to DXV in After Effects and Cinema4D
[FIXED] Transitioning from a clip with less than 100% opacity, starts the transition at 100%
[FIXED] Alpha Type interpretation switches after save and reload
[FIXED] File codec and Alpha channel not recognised correctly
[FIXED] MirrorQuad renders black line with DXV files
[FIXED] Resolume reports screen size as 0x0
[FIXED] After creating a new composition, the blend modes of the previous comp are still shown
[FIXED] Improved Mac Pro multi screen performance
[FIXED] Wipe transitions up, right and left have a small jump at start
[FIXED] midi/osc/dmx mapping smpte delay is not possible
[FIXED] Decklink 4k rgb support
[FIXED] Memory usage increases slowly on audio files
[FIXED] Still images with custom duration values are reset after relinking
[FIXED] DXV Codec Compression type checkbox (in AE DXV Settings dialog) hit area size too small
[FIXED] Cannot load BMD4K device when Decklink is in use
[FIXED] When starting a comp with a BM device, it will default back to its first setting
[FIXED] Switching to a deck with an active BM device

Dalziel-Pow is a London-based agency with over 30 years' experience in brand and retail design, passionate about creating retail experiences that are unique and engaging for the customer.

A few days ago, they sent us the link to their amazing new project:

http://www.dalziel-pow.com/news/interactive-animations-retail-design-expo

They were kind enough to expand a little about how the project works:
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It's a giant screen printed illustration into a touch sensitive midi-controller using conductive ink.
It's proving massively popular in the retail world and we're getting plenty of publicity for it.

And rightly so! The playful artwork looks gorgeous, and the interactive projection elements complement it really well.

Using Resolume has been a great help getting the project up and running:

The ability to play multiple layers at once was really what drew us to the software - very handy and more importantly, very stable. With a powerful enough machine we must have been playing something like 30 layers simultaneously when we where stress testing!

The midi mapping feature meant we could trigger content using conductive ink through the picture itself.
http://www.bareconductive.com/

Be sure to check out their other work at http://www.dalziel-pow.com/

This time we have three familiar names representing the Res footage label.

Ostwerker get their mecha on with Robotronic:

Get Robotronic *exclusively* from Resolume Footage!

Catmac is our resident psychonaut. His new pack SpiritMolecule is full of psychedelic patterns and fractal geometry:

Get SpiritMolecule *exclusively* from Resolume Footage

And Artificially Awake just does what he does best, bang out amazing content:

Get Gimbal VJ footage by Artificially Awake

This list contains all the FFGL effects for Resolume we know about at the moment. Most of them are free, some are premium.

Compatible with Resolume 7 (64 bit)

Hybrid Visuals Chaser, Stageflow and Pulse:
https://hybridconstructs.com/shop/

Subpixel Various plugins (windows Only)
https://www.subpixels.com/

William Rood aceFX bundle
https://williamrood.net/new/store/acefx2

Angelo Dvizion's Mapper 2, Maste rFX, Kaleido FX and Change to Color
http://www.dvizion.net/portfolio-category/tools/

Daniel Arnett's 360 VJ plugin turns your world upside down and inside out
https://github.com/DanielArnett/360-VJ

Motus Lumina's GeneraXYZ footage packs with FFGL plugins
https://www.resolume.com/footage/GeneraXYZ2
https://www.resolume.com/footage/GeneraXYZ

Juicebar Marketplace with FFGL plugins and other helpful tools
https://get-juicebar.com/

FDVJ Fulldome VJ plugins
https://www.fulldomevjs.com/fdvj/

Plus Fisheye and Ascii
https://raduplus.gumroad.com/l/fisheyeffgl
https://raduplus.gumroad.com/l/asciiffgl

Scratchpole's Starglow effect (Mac only)
https://community.vuo.org/t/starglow-image-filter-for-ffgl-export/6209

Shady Headstash collection of shaders and Wire example patches ported to compiled Wire patches
https://www.headsta.sh/shop/resolume/all/

Notch Block plugin (Windows only)
https://github.com/notchvfx/notchblock_ffgl/

VFXArtShop different FFGL plugins (Windows only)
https://www.vfxartshop.com/product-category/ffgl

Compatible with Resolume 6 and earlier (32/64 bit)

Hybrid Visuals Chaser
https://hybridconstructs.com/shop/

BigFug fugGlitch, fugFeedback, fugPower and fugScope
https://github.com/bigfug/Freeframe

Subpixel TriTone and AutoMask (windows Only)
https://www.subpixels.com/

Visution Mapio
https://visution.com/

William Rood aceFX bundle
https://williamrood.net/new/vjplugins

Trypta Kaleido (PC only)
http://resolume.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=10008

Angelo Dvizion's KaleidoFX, MasterFX and the amazing Mapper
http://www.dvizion.net/portfolio-category/tools/

Yochee has been porting some Shadertoy goodness to FFGL (PC only)
https://www.7dex.de/works/ffgl-plugins/

We ported Dani Berio's Fireworks to native FFGL and made it part of the open source FFGL repo.
https://github.com/resolume/ffgl/releases

VJ-Spack-O-Mat Lots of fractally and shiny goodness (all plugins PC Only)
https://github.com/trifox/Spack-O-Mat-FFGL-Plugins/tree/2.0.0/release

Daniel Arnett's 360 VJ plugin turns your world upside down and inside out
https://github.com/DanielArnett/360-VJ

FDVJ Fulldome VJ plugins
https://www.fulldomevjs.com/fdvj/

Plus Fisheye
https://raduplus.gumroad.com/l/fisheyeffgl

VFXArtShop different FFGL plugins (Windows only)
https://www.vfxartshop.com/product-category/ffgl

Compatible with Resolume 5 and earlier (32 bit only)

Visution ClipSA, FaderSA, IR OSCSA, IR Keystone2[3], IR Cosmic Pack
https://visution.com/legacy-products/

Dani, Resolume DropShadow and Fireworks
http://resolume.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8506
http://resolume.com/blog/7610

Hybrid Visuals Plexus:
http://www.resolume.com/footage/plexus

Marc Wren sfColorRings, sfSpiderPoints, sfJuniperStar, sfBranches
http://sffreeframe.sourceforge.net/ (careful, these plugins seem to be abandoned)

Oleg Potiy FFGLTriangleMixer (Mac & PC), FFGLVolumeRenderer (PC only)
https://github.com/OlegPotiy/FFGLTriangleMX/tree/master/Bins
https://github.com/OlegPotiy/FFGLVolumeRenderer/tree/master/Bins

Lynn Jarvis Spout FFGL, ShaderLoader, ShaderMaker, AutoThreshold (PC only)
https://github.com/leadedge

Chris Korda Triplight
https://sourceforge.net/projects/triplight/
https://github.com/victimofleisure/TripLight/releases

Team Syphon Syphon FFGL (Mac only)
http://syphon.v002.info/

Darren Mothersele Noise, RGB Source, Spiral Source, Underwater Life, Evil, Plasma Ball (all plugins Mac only)
https://github.com/cyrilcode/ffglplugin-examples

FDVJ Fulldome VJ plugins
https://www.fulldomevjs.com/fdvj/

Plus Fisheye
https://raduplus.gumroad.com/l/fisheyeffgl





So how do I use these plugins with Resolume?

On Resolume 6, drop them in the Extra Effects subfolder in Resolume's folder in Documents. Resolume will load this folder automatically on the next launch.

On Resolume 5 and before, create a new folder called ‘FFGL Plugins’ inside the Resolume folder in My Documents (PC) or Documents (Mac). Copy the unzipped .bundle file (Mac) or .dll file (PC) into that folder. In Resolume, add this folder as an extra FFGL plugin folder in the video tab of the preferences. Restart Resolume and the plugins will be loaded.

Let's try to keep this thread clean, so it stays a good resource. Please post additions and changes as comments below, we will then update the list accordingly.

This is not the place to discuss problems with these plugins. For support, you will have to contact the developer of the plugin directly. This is not the place to discuss FFGL development, there's a separate board for that.