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