After almost a year scratchworx.com finally gave us a review and some awesome pictures of the Ohm64. While this was the first generation Ohm64 (powder coated not anodized faceplate, no countersunk screws, and numbered buttons) the review is good and the pictures are awesome.

“If you want a workhorse, something designed for a single job, such as an Ableton Live or Logic or Traktor controller, there are plenty of other things on the market. If, however, you find yourself and your creative urges heavily influenced by all that surrounds you and get inspiration from the rewards proffered from not only personalising and customising things until they’re uniquely yours, but, admittedly, overcoming the shortcomings of a device and truly learning your equipment, I cannot recommend the Ohm64 highly enough.”

You can read the full review here.

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reviews by Jay

Austin Producer/DJ Augustine Verrengia a.k.a ONE4ALL created a demo of the Molar VST Plugin.

ONE4ALL has also provided his Live project file, and Molar VSTi presets to get you started. You can download those here.

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news by Jay

Finally! I got to fix some bugs that had been continually put down the priority list. Presets and setup are now more reliable on OhmSound, and it’s updated with the latest build of Max. OhmSound is incredibly fun – you can really get a huge variety of sounds out of it. For example….:

Download the new application from our support page

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news by Peter

Johnny Dekam and I go way back…on the internet. While we’ve only met in person maybe three times in the past decade, we’ve been pursuing a lot of the same things in our professional lives by trying to get the most out of live computer video. He’s released a number of computer video programs, starting with VIDVOX Prophet in around 1998, which has taken a few twists and turns, and resulted in the live video software VDMX. He’s also worked in immersive video environments with Eluminati, released his own audio and video CDs and DVDs, and has been doing live video tours with artists such as Thomas Dolby and Dream Theater.

Johnny just finished up a tour doing video for the Glitch Mob, so last month I drove over the hills and through the woods (true: that’s what’s between San Jose and Santa Cruz!) to one of the last stops on the tour at the Catalyst Club in Santa Cruz, California. It was great to catch up and get some insights into his video performance system. I really appreciate how he takes full advantage of his programming expertise to use the Ohm64′s flexibility to create a show control system that incorporates VDMX video mixing software, the Vixid video mixer, and a Max patch to tie everything together. We chatted before the show started, so here’s some of the interview in text, video, and pictures. You can learn more about Johnny DeKam at his website.

PART 1: HISTORY AND SETUP

PETER: I guess I wanted to start with a bit of history. I was doing Yow* and you were doing…what was it at the time?
JOHNNY DEKAM: Well, the first product I ever put out was Prophet, which was before I started doing anything with (Cycling 74′s Max) , so that would be before we even met.
P: What (enviroment) did you program Prophet with?
JDK: That was written in C. I collaborated with a guy in Australia, who now works for Microsoft. He had a shareware QuickTime movie player that had a scrub/jog wheel in an inspector window, and I was like, “Do you you think you could take the OMS SDK and add MIDI control to THAT? That would be AWESOME!” Over about 6 months, we banged out a MIDI-enabled, DV-enabled video player.
P: Did it have crossfading or compositing?
JDK: No, it was straight playback, you could assign clips to keys, and you could jog and scrub. And then I started to play with nato, and I quickly had my first mixer in that, which got so good, I thought I could release that, which became VDMX 1.
P: Yeah, you get the bug.
JDK: Yeah, I got the bug. Then came 2,3,and 4 which mapped nato to softVNS at some point. At 4, I left the company, and gave to my employees, took the title of “Founder” and they re-wrote everything in Cocoa (for OS X). I still use VDMX as my main video server, and I don’t have to program it anymore!
P: Were you doing video editing before you started Prophet, or what got you into the idea of live video?
JDK: No, I was in grad school (at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) and my theses was about agents-based art making for media. The end result was a performance with audio sampling and video sampling, married, running on separate machines, with a Max brain controlling everything. Arkaos was running on one for the video, and Lisa from STEIM (sampling software) on the other. That’s was where I said “I hate Arkaos and I’d really like to write my own video software.” I was always was doing computer music and video together, and that was inspired forming VIDVOX.
P: I had the same reaction to Arkaos. I thought, yeah, I can trigger clips with MIDI, but this is such a pain in the ass, I just need to make my own.
One thing I realized is that we keep crossing paths. You did (Thomas) Dolby’s tour (visuals), and just before that I had worked with him on a project for TED, and also set him up with the software for his tour.
JDK: Right, he was using your patch for that tour, and I had made him a custom (video) mixer that I was rocking for that tour.
P: And now we are both using the Ohm64! What shows have you been touring in the past few years. I know you did Dolby, now you are doing Glitch Mob.
JDK: Dream Theater was the biggest one – I did two world tours with them. Sasha and Digweed was the first one I ever did, back in the day.
Dream Theater was a major, major commitment – a year long each time, and I did that twice. I used the Ohm for the second half of the second tour. I was using a Lemur for the first half. The Lemur was great, I had programmed all the custom interfaces for that. The basic goal was to control the (Vixid) hardware mixer and the (VDMX) software mixer from one place, and the Lemur functioned just great for that, EXCEPT you had to look at the (Lemur) screen to make sure your fingers are in the right place. After I got back from the American leg, I got the Ohm64.
P: That is an interesting point – with visuals, you can’t get away with looking at your control surface. You can do it with music, but you pretty much have to be able to see your video.
JDK: Yeah, I still look down, but when it comes to rocking faders and knobs, I can just feel it, it’s a lot more tactile.
P: So what is your setup?
JDK: In the background, I’m running Max. This started with your basic editor, and I tore it apart and rebuilt it. What’s left are the interface elements and the sysex engine.
P: Good. There WAS a good reason to make it open source!
JDK: Yeah! It worked out really well. I basically needed to do was to divide up the (grid) into different functionality. The Ohm is really well suited to control the Vixid because this is a four track video mixer, so everything lines up really well. The grid is divided into four 4x4s. The upper left quadrant controls the inputs – the vixid has 4 inputs per track. For Dream Theater, I had eight cameras, so it was really good to have that many inputs and i needed to be able to select different cameras on different tracks.
P: Are you doing camera work with the Glitch Mob?
JDK: There’s three cameras, and I use it in a very limited way – there’s some solos that I bring them in, and there’s a time I bring in all 3 at once in a split screen. For Dream Theater I needed to do four cameras at once – quadrants.

At this point, Johnny dives into a detailed explanation of his setup. Rather than try to transcribe it, I’ll let you just watch the videos on how he uses the Ohm64 and his Max patch to control the Vixid hardware’s inputs, outputs, and effects, along with VDMX’s video clips and effects. (apologies for the quick start, end, and middle cuts-there was a LOT of setup noise that interfered)

continue to part 2…

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interviews by Peter

PART TWO: CREATING CONTENT AND WORKING THE SHOW
(in case you missed part 1, you can find it here)
PETER: How do you manage content and structure for the tour?
JOHNNY DEKAM: In this case, I did nearly all the songs in the studio to the point where I can press play or press play with embellishment with effects on top.
P: So you pretty much have the sequence setup and then play around with effects
JDK: Some of them I don’t even need to do anything
P: Life on the road!
JDK: This one, the only thing I do is use a mirror in the middle of it a couple times, if I feel like it….I’ve got hue shift, too.
P: Do you use any audio input?
JDK: No, all that I did in the studio – I had all the music in advance so I did a lot of stuff with audio. This is all audio reactive content, but from their tracks. They told me upfront that the music would be very close to the album especially in timing. They play all the parts live, but they will be the same duration, measures are all set. So I can do BPM based effects.
P: You don’t really have a problem with a venue wanting to go longer or shorter?
JDK: No, sometimes they’ll change the order of the set list. They do improv….but it’s all in the context of the same structure. They might do a different synth line or effect or filter. I improvise effects with that. Some songs are full on vj improv, others, I could just press play.
P: On long tours, you can’t work too hard, because it’s so much hard work already!
JDK: I have to be here every night, so I might as well make it interesting! Some nights if I’m really tired, I can let it run, and that’s ok, because I invested all that time in the studio.
P: Did you work closely with them on the visuals, or did they just say “do your thing?”
JDK: I always try to collaborate as much as I can with the artist. They started out saying “you have creative freedom,” then I got to work, then they said “we’d love to see what you have” then I got feedback. We had 3 or 4 sessions like that. We had an initial meeting and talked about what the songs were about, and what inspired (a certain) song. They don’t have any lyrics, just titles.
P: So you have to come up with visualization? Like, where does the song take place in [the Glitch Mob's] mind?
JDK: Definitely. I had to be pretty creative in a lot of cases.
P: How long did it take from the first brainstorm meeting to actually finishing the content?
JDK: I guess I spent about 3 months on it in the studio getting it ready. Nearly full time. That includes building the rack, and getting everything together hardware-wise. By the time we walked into rehearsals, all I had to do was polish off some mixes, and a couple songs I left till the end that we built in rehearsals, and had to tweak some things at the start of the tour if things weren’t working.
A lot of these songs are setup where there’s a two channel system. There are projectors aimed across their bodies as a light, knowing there would be a lot of venues that would just have bar can (lights). Sometimes it’s separate content, or color mixed differently, so it might be red on the screen but green on their bodies.
P: That’s a nice way to think about it, “video as lighting.”
JDK: Yes, a lot of people have reacted well to that, and it helps add a nice effect to the stage.

Finally, I wanted to give you a taste of what the show is like. I have a crappy video that’s not worth embedding, but you can look at it on our vimeo site if you must. Johnny will be sending a more professional excerpt shot on a good camera that we’ll post in the near future (hint: follow us on twitter and you’ll know when it’s up!). For more about the Glitch Mob, check out their website. Also, Mike Abb, one of our product specialists, did the camera for this great interview with the Glitch Mob.

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interviews by Peter