Lucifer is a plug-in that does real-time audio slicing and repeats — as in for music. So what is this plug-in, running in Ableton Live as a host (hmm, music again), showing up on Create Digital Motion? Because our friend Momo used its MIDI output capabilities to trigger video — and got an unusual interaction between sound and visual as a result. Now, I’m in the camp that says Ableton Live should stay a music app; there are too many well-developed visual tools that Live would never equal. But this is the exception that proves that point: by thinking in a musical way when triggering visuals, you get a relationship between the two you wouldn’t otherwise. Momo shows us how in the latest VJ Kung Fu tutorial. -PK
If you’re not familiar with Lucifer, it’s a VST/AU plugin for realtime beat-based cutup/repeats of audio. What you’re going to do is route the MIDI from Lucifer out to another program that will do Video cutups. This is useful for more than just video – with the MIDI signals coming out of Lucifer, you can control and trigger and MIDI-capable software and hardware.
We figured out a way to control video using the awesome Lucifer plugin while working on our Karate Kid AV Remix. In response to a few inquiries about just how we made this work, I put together a video tutorial showing how to set up Lucifer to output MIDI.
Karate Kid AV Remix from momo_the_monster on Vimeo.
While this particular implementation is specific to the Lucifer plug-in, it’s a thought-provoking approach to doing AV Cutups. You could build a similar method by creating MIDI clips that output common/useful triggering patterns, and trigger those instead of mashing buttons to directly start your videos.
Also, this method involves looking at the MIDI Sync information coming from Live and using that to figure out a proper loop-length for your video. This way, you can use a longish video by simply adjusting the ‘play start’ point rather than cutting your videos down to 8 or 16 proper-length versions.
Hit VJ Kung Fu for the full article.