Visual platform, VJ tool, and media server Resolume keeps adding cool stuff. 7.9 brings advanced monitoring right on your display, perfect for more complex settings and mapping, plus a big, easy search tool for bringing up all the modules (nodes) inside the Wire patching environment.
There’s a lot to this update:
Monitoring. So, in the very early days of VJing, previewing was a pretty simplistic affair – partly because horsepower at the time meant that doing any kind of preview risked spending precious frames. (That was painful, given not so long ago we were at 240p.)
But now it’s 2022, and monitoring is GPU-accelerated and you might want to check out what’s happening with part of a particular projection/LED mapping, or you might be routing between applications with Spout, or what have you. Resolume 7.7 already allowed as many preview monitors as you wanted, with the ability to check out groups and layers. That and other live-friendly features mean that Resolume can be a great real-time hub for visuals created in other tools, from live coding to game engines to heavy-duty VFX tools.
The feature here lets you preview right from Output and CrossFader. It’s explained nicely in the video. But between 7.7 and 7.9, you can easily preview whatever you want, wherever you want. It’s almost as easy as it was with those little TV screens with composite ins.
Friendlier Wire patching. Wire is the other reason to be excited about Resolume right now – open modular patching integrated with the system. The individual blocks they call “nodes,” which I always thought was the most boring and un-synthesizer-like name, but you know what this means – little blocks you wire together to form other stuff. Modular. I dream of wires. Wire.
This update doesn’t bring fancy new capabilities or some new patching paradigm – it simply makes it easier to bring up the nodes you want to patch together. But that’s a very big deal as quality-of-life enhancement. It’s something that makes exploration easier. Here’s what to go try:
- There’s a new Node Library with search. And yeah, this brings up a heiarchical preview with Spotlight-style search bar, just as you’ve come to expect in a lot of visual and musical tools.
- Double-click on the canvas, inlets, outlets, or a wire to bring up Node Library and search.
- CMD-ENTER/CTRL-ENTER with a node selected also brings up search.
- Suggestions automatically brings up just the nodes that work with a selected node’s connection. Oh, here is something every patching environment should shamelessly copy – so if you bring up the Node Library from an outlet, for example, it only displays Nodes that work with that outlet. This is also easy to see in the video. (I think that would be more or less relevant depending on how patchable particular items are, but some kind of suggestion tools would be welcome in other environments.)
- Insert nodes. Same – please copy this. Double-click or right-click a wire, and you can insert a module in the signal flow. Why. Don’t. All. Modular. Environments. Work. Like. This. It’s. A. Damned. Computer. Sorry. (Isadora 3 has similar functionality worth copying – bump to connect, drag and drop into to insert a module into a connection, and auto-heal upon deletion so you don’t lose the connection when eleting.)
- Drag-and-drop Wire patch installation. This isn’t mentioned in the video, but it’s just as important – you can now drop any compiled Wire patch onto Arena or Avenue and it’ll be copied and categorized in the Wire category. (It’s really a fix from a past behavior, but it means sharing and moving patches is easier.)
There are a bunch of fixes, too, like refreshing FFmpeg to 4.3. Plus “Black BG” (background?) I guess was erroneously translated “Black Beijing,” which while it was a bug, should maybe be the name of a doom-themed industrial techno party we organize with some Chinese ex-pat friends here in Berlin. There are also some Apple Silicon fixes here and there – more on that picture soon.
https://resolume.com/blog/21242/resolume-7-9-preview-advanced-output-screens-amp-node-library-search
Have I been obsessively covering Resolume updates lately? Absolutely. Yippe-kai-yee, Create Digital Motion. Essential tips: