Introduction

Visual jockey (VJ) effects for music videos involve the creative manipulation of visual elements to enhance the viewer's experience and complement the music. These effects can range from simple color grading and editing techniques to more complex visual distortions, overlays, and animations synchronized with the music's rhythm and mood. VJs often use software and hardware tools to achieve real-time manipulation during live performances or pre-rendered effects for music videos.

Lecture Lab Practice

Before you proceed to the steps of using creating your video effect using VisualJockey, here are the preview clip of the video I created during the demonstration uploaded to my YouTube account;

The following clip shows a dog image used to create the video effect for the Who Let the Dogs Out song. The clip has an anaglyph effect to make it more ultra-realistic.

To view the video, make sure you making using of a pair of 3D glasses to see the anaglyphic effect. The following cheap paper 3D glasses will do just fine!

Lab Guide

Through this guide, I will walk you through my process of creating the VJ effect shown in the Lab Result section of this article.

Step 1: Drag A Picture Loader Into Composition Project

The Picture Loader element allows you to insert your custom image into your VJ effect.

Drag it into the composition project and select your preferred image from your computer.

Step 2: Drag 3D and 2D Effects Into Composition Project

To make the image more static, you need to add effects to the image. Visual Jockey offers various 2D and 3D effects that you can make use of. Each effect is also highly flexible for you to customize their behavior.

Drag the 3D effect into the project to give it a Twister effect when playing.

Step 3: Make Effects Respond To Sound Input Using SSytem Stream

One way to make your VJ effect more fun is to make the 2D and 3D effects added to react to the properties of your music such as the Bass and Treble values. For example, the 2D effect could spin much faster when the music treble level increases.

Step 4: Add Anaglyph Effect For 3D looks

To bring your VJ effect to life you can place an Anaglyph effect over it. Using a 3D glass, you will see the effects you have added float about in an anaglyphic effect.

Conclusion

Within this lab, I learned about Visual Jockey and how greatly it improves the interactivity of music videos. I further developed my visual jockey effect using the Visual Jockey software.

Further Readings

• Rhythmism: a VJ performance system with maracas based devices by Satoru dangkang Tokuhisa, Yukinari Iwata, Masa Inakage.

• EffecTV: A Real-Time Software Video Effect Processor for Entertainment by Kentaro Fukuchi , Sam Mertens & Ed Tannenbaum

• Video Jockeys: New Media in Performance Art by Pigg, Ella