I've been aching to get more into VJing — short for "Video Jockeying", realtime performance of visuals and effects, often synced to accompanying music as part of a multimedia experience — but I've run into one aggravation after another when demo'ing different VJ tools. There are a lot of them, many of which I've tried, but no clear standouts.

This, to me, says there's some glaring holes in the market, opportunities that can be taken advantage of to boost the awareness and practice of VJing as an artform. At present, if you're uninitiated, it's not as easy to get into VJing as say, step-time image or video editing. Speaking of, one of my fave Sony Vegas features, that I've used in such videos as "Submarines", is that I can change the grid units from time (in seconds) to beats per minute (BPM) and easily sync and lock events to the tempo of a track. Vegas' interface is very amenable to those who're already familiar with video sequencing.

(Video art by Nam June Paik, rhymes with cake.)

So where are all the VJ apps that allow you to record sequences of your moves and not just play them back, but edit them too? You could turn a promising-but-rough performance into a polished basis for a music video, ad, or other promotional material. Even ArKaos, which touts themselves as being a "world-leading provider", is missing this feature. And it has many odd, rough edges in its UI which remind me of Cubase… circa 1995. ArKaos also BSODed me when I tried to export a recording as QuickTime, and its Windows Media Player output was oddly tinted pink.

Advanced users are familiar with the likes of Max/MSP, Processing, and Quartz Composer. Newcomers, including myself, would like something easier to get into. But even those options are limited: Livid's site looked pretty fresh and promisingly indicative of product quality (save an odd misspelling of "downloads"), but even their new intended-for-beginners Cell, despite having a "DOWNLOAD DEMO" link on the page, doesn't actually have a demo version. The more advanced sibling, Union, does have a demo. However, I was also frustrated here, because despite some potential hawtness like being easily able to "scratch" video clips akin to a pictorial turntable, I didn't see an easy way to get the visuals to respond to an audio stream (at did figure how to do that in ArKaos). Hey, maybe it was a really easy control I missed, but that wasn't apparent upfront. If I can't find it, I can't make use of it. No good.

And then there's the likes of Resolume, sometimes compared to ArKaos, which has its own share of quirks. The interface is devoid of antialiasing and uses a hard-to-read font almost bordering on cursive, and reminiscent of something from an old Mac. It's nice they have a demo, but hopefully they'll fix the broken download link on one page. Once more, despite the potential, too many problem points deter me from exploring it.

There's also Modul8, which is only for Macs, which won't do a mostly-Windows-using person like me much good. And again, it looks like it can record a sequence of events, but not edit them later before rendering. Is this really such a stretch? Not when you think of something like Ableton Live, which as the name indicates, is geared for live music performance and has a capable, configurable sequencer. Live 6 also added the ability to play QuickTime vids, so it wouldn't surprise me if they end up biting more of a chunk out of the VJ market (and deservedly so).

Let's not forget the more esoteric and even free VJ possibilities either, like Neon v2 — the demo vids are reminiscent of ye olde computer demoscene, but you really need to create your own settings, because presets are scarce. It's certainly uncomfortable how prevalent skimpy stock material is amongst various VJ softwares to help you get started. Even Winamp visualizers like MilkDrop offer a lot more presets! I would expect no less than an abundance of ready-to-roll awesomeness, because audio synthesizers routinely offer hundreds of sounds to base your further adventures on. To be fair, some VJ softwares boast of how many effects and Freeframe plugins they include, and I'm enthused about the use of one's graphics card and pixel shader effects to provide eye candy, but the path to applying these glorious sights and feeling rewarded that you're getting stuff done in the proggy is muddy.

International possibilities like Japan's motion dive are also out there, but even harder to use in some cases if not localized for English. (Try figuring out an obfuscated set of controls that looks like a NASA scientist's workstation without a decent manual or tutorial!) Overarchingly, I've observed a number of VJ packages seem to have redeeming parts that should all be within a single, unified program instead of "VJ app X does 1 but not 2, while VJ app Y does 2 but not 1 or 3 or 4". Would that be too much of a behemoth? Not if well-designed. Clutter needs to get out of the way so you can focus on putting on a great show, and as appropriate, modifying it afterwards.

Looks like a common trend that a lot of VJ software, perhaps because of their inherent nature to be "cutting-edge creative", have outright wack interfaces. Lack of familiar conventions makes it difficult to begin and far too many text input fields, buttons, sliders, knobs, etc. packed into a tiny space without any intuitive inference as to what each one does leaves me at a loss.

Throughout all this, I'm really thankful more advances are being made in the field as time goes on, and altho I generalize, existing VJ software is certainly capable of doing many great things. But really, there should be an easier onramp. I know a number of these VJ software sites are peppered with praise about how stable the software is, or how it helped the crowd whip into an (good) excited frenzy, but to reinforce my earlier point, actual testimonials of how easy a particular program is to use are hardly anywhere to be found.

Is this important? Yes.

I'm hoping that similar to what Apple did with iMovie and GarageBand, a company will make a significant impact in popularizing VJing by way of easy-to-use-yet-powerful tools. The key feature for me here is combining realtime performance with steptime editing, since it looks common to have one, but not both. Maybe it's already happened and I haven't come across it yet in my many searches — if so, they need better advertising, and that includes word-of-mouth joy.

I'm sure Peter Kirn and friends know something I don't.