Edirol (Roland) V4. Korg Entrancer. Kids, as your… uh weird VJ aunties and uncles. But there was once a time when video hardware was great. And the mighty Eurorack house of video, LZX Industries, is getting back in the game. Videomancer looks delicious.
LZX is apparently ramping up production across the business, which is great to see. (It’s not been an easy time for anyone in hardware, for many reasons.) LZX has long been a brand that does what only a handful dare: making Eurorack modules built around video rather than sound. They make an impressive complete system for the job, the Double Vision. And there’s a single module that converts Eurorack voltages into video signals, ESG3. But it’s the Videomancer that has my eye. Halloween brought a new teaser:
This is an FPGA system, which brings me back over a decade to the Milkymist FPGA effect unit — that apparently lives on online.
Videomancer is a new device, though, at $999, with both analog and digital effects processing. It’s ready for any format — NTSC, PAL, 240p, 288p, 480p, 576p, 720p50/59.94/60, 1080i50/59.94/60, and 1080p23.98/24/25/29.97/30. (Whoa.) And it promises “professional-grade processing to destructive glitch, noise, and bit-reduction programs.”
Maybe the easiest way to understand it is to check out the first page of its quick start. This just has everything you could want. All you need is devices to feed it, whether that’s Eurorack or computers or handhelds or analog video sources or whatever you imagine.
And yes, this brings some hope that LZX can get beyond the issues with the Cromagnon, announced in 2019, which was hit hard by COVID-era component delays and caused some severe friction as a result. (It is in fact true that we saw suppliers start to measure components in years — this for individual components — and that this still disrupts the situation today, whatever the exact relationship with LZX and their customers.)
I’m intrigued. I would definitely buy this before a half a CDJ.
https://lzxindustries.net/products/videomancer
