Designing

[Peyton]

Hey, How's it goin'?
I'm relatively new to this whole visual jockey business, I've been doing it for about 6months and using resolume for about 4. I've nowhere near reached some of the stuff you guys do and have barely scratched the surface of what the program is capable of.
Recently I've been playing around with flash and trying to make my own visuals/animations, I'm just wondering whats the best way/program for doing this sort of thing?

[VJair]

thats a question with very broad answers.

do you want your work to be 3d, 2d, motion graphics, cinematic..... the list goes on realy.

some popular applications are

After effects / motion for compositing and creating

3d studio max / maya / cinema 4d for 3d work

premiere / final cut / vegas for video editing

this by no means an exhaustive list of what aps there are and what can be done with them, just a few popluar choices that came to mind which i have some experience of. some people make the miost amazing work from software a lot of people would consider to be "toy software", its realy down to the person using it and how much they are willing to learn the software to get the best out of it.

[luz]

i'm also new to the vj-ing and i performed my first set last week. for that i started to collect old movies (e.g. wizard of oz, fantasia, ...) and documentaries (e.g. bbc) and picked out the interesting pieces to get a lot of material in a short time.
i'm also familiar with animation in 2D (after effects) and 3D (C4D) but to save some time i came up with using a little green screen to make some high contrasted outline footage. this might be also a way for you (?!)
but for that case you need a camera and some software for keying (after effects).



a little sample video:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dinglukai/2954486777/

[bart]

Nice one luz, the simple approach is usually the best.

[near]

woa! Loved the high contrast effect.

[Peyton]

Thanks for the replys lads, I suppose I'm looking aswell for an inexpensive way of doing things aswell, Its a part-time job for me at the moment which really doesn't require the kind of effort I'm already putting into it, its more something I enjoy doing and more of a hobby at this stage so I can't afford to invest heavily in it right now.
Also, does creating visuals ever involve programming? I'm currently doing a Computer&Electronics Degree and it would be cool if I could those skills for visuals.
I know I'm putting alot into one message but how does one go about designing text visuals with variable text?
I appreciate any responces.
Cheers,
Peyton