The all-new architecture for macOS VJ mainstay VDMX6 has opened up a ton of powerful new features. If you haven’t caught them already, and you’ve got a Mac, now is a great time to dive in. Why not cosplay Hari Seldon from Foundation and turn yourself into a glitchy hologram?
“Whatever happened to VDMX?” Okay, apparently some people have forgotten the genius of RSS and/or don’t hover over the refresh button reading CDM. Fair. But I’ve been keeping tabs on VDMX6, and it’s hugely powerful. There’s still nothing else quite like it for live visuals, particularly its unique semi-modular architecture. The live visual world needs VDMX, and it’s back with a vengeance.
First, there was the spring update, with a ton of new goodies, some powered by AI (the friendly, useful pixel-pushing kind). I think
- 🧠 Video Tracking – Face, hand, & body detection
- 🔍 OCR – Scan text & QR codes in real-time
- 📈 Scopes – Vectorscopes & waveforms for color precision
- 🎨 Color Transfer FX – Match any video’s aesthetic
- 🌀 Segmented Blur & more FX goodness
I covered that update here:
But since then, I did miss that the fun folks of Vidvox came up with this brilliant tutorial video — all thanks to the power of background removal:
And yeah, you can bet I’ll be thinking about how to do processing-cheap ways of ripping off some visual effects from Foundation in real-time. (I am sure you could get the effect of him glitching as he materializes in front of Gaal. Look, it’s S1E5 if you’re watching the show. They didn’t remember that? It’s sort of a scifi TV trope. I can relate; I’m often glitching in some half-materialized form between realities, not entirely reconstituted after dying, especially if I haven’t had any coffee yet.)
Creating glitchy hologram style visuals with the Remove Background FX in VDMX6