Live visuals and VJing are growing and maturing faster than ever, but even as projectors beam stunning visuals into performances and installations, there’s surprisingly little light shed on the community behind the work. Earlier this summer, CDM asked readers what visual apps you used. Some 1,152 of you responded from around the world – a dramatic sample of this vivid network of visual practitioners. And at last, we get to share the results. It’s not a contest – we’re as interested in what people are doing on the fringes as what’s popular – but the results are fascinating.
Tools
Amidst some serious variety, some clear favorites emerged. (To be fair, the leading visual apps did mobilize their readership to go and vote, but that in itself to me is meaningful. And these results were consistent with what we’ve seen from readers and the scene.)
Modul8, Resolume Avenue, Quartz Composer, and VDMX clearly led the pack. In fact, if you combine Resolume Avenue 3 users (25% of respondents) with Resolume 2.x die-hards (8%), it’s the most popular tool on the site. The results, ranked:
1. Modul8 (28.5%)
2. Resolume Avenue 3 (25.6%)
3. Vidvox VDMX (19.4%)
4. Apple Quartz Composer (19.3%)
5. Max/MSP/Jitter (16%) *
6. Processing (15.4%)
7. vvvv (10.2%)
8. ArKaos GrandVJ (8.4%)
9. Resolume 2.x (8.1%)
10. Isadora (6.9%)
11. OpenFrameworks (5.8%)
12. Pd/GEM (4.3%)
The biggest surprise: there’s some seriously geeky stuff on there. I’m surprised Quartz Composer cracks the top three, even if it is free, and Processing and OpenFrameworks also make strong showings for coders. So do Jitter and vvvv for patchers.
A handful of you also use other, lesser-known tools we included — Touch Designer nearly climbed above Pd, and we saw significant numbers running mobile apps and game engines.
There’s a strong plurality for everything else, too – 16% of you said you used tools we didn’t list.
The big loser: hardware. Only 16 readers out of all the respondents said they use hardware exclusively. Viva la computer.
Interesting entrants for that “other” category, meanwhile: lots of CoGe users, NuVJ, Cinder, AVmixer pro, Fluxus, and some unusual choices, like GamePad Companion for Guitar Hero,VLC, Winamp AVS, and, yes, someone says they use PowerPoint.
CoGe is technically built in Quartz Composer, so score that as another win for Apple’s platform.
* Jitter was briefly excluded from the survey answers because of an error; those results were tabulated and clearly put Jitter ahead of Processing but behind VDMX. Definitely a strong showing for Cycling ’74.
Operating systems
No surprise here. The Mac was the big winner – which goes hand-in-hand with seeing that a lot of your favorite tools (Quartz Composer, VDMX, Modul8) only run on Mac OS. Given ongoing readership by Linux advocates, I thought the Linux showing was downright abysmal. Given the lack of interest in Linux relative even to the music world, I think the free OS has a long way to go in the visual department. Again, it’s not a popularity contest – if someone wants to work on that, we’d love to hear about it.
1. Mac OS X (71.8%)
2. Windows (25.7%)
3. Linux (1.9%)
Don’t despair, Windows users – that still means 1 in 4 of you runs Windows, so we’re not ignoring you. And even if 1 in 50 runs Linux, we also know that coverage of Linux for visuals is often lacking. So expect tri-OS coverage (and beyond), as always.
Geography
SurveyGizmo automatically collects geographic data. The top countries:
1. United States (23.8%)
2. Germany (9.7%)
3. United Kingdom (9.6%)
4. Canada (5.5%)
5. Netherlands (5.0%)
6. France (3.9%)
And other popular countries: Italy, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, Denmark, Austria, Hungary, Ireland, Mexico, Portugal, Switzerland, and the Russian Federation.
Top cities included, by a pretty wide margin:
Berlin
New York City
Buenos Aires
Chicago
Dublin
London
Montreal
Paris
San Francisco
Sao Paolo
Toronto
Berlin, London, and NYC led by far, but down the curve, you all come from basically everywhere. And that, to me, is the most interesting information of all.
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