2ManyDjs - Video to DMX

In 2010, 2ManyDjs was touring with a show where they were playing their tracks from DVDs, rather than from CDs. This was the case because they had hired artists to animate the record sleeves for each of the songs they were playing. They also had a custom built DJ booth that they were flying around.

This DJ booth was special as it was fitted with a grid of 132 lights in the front, which would be operated by the lighting engineer that was travelling with them. At least that was until Paul Chambers came up with the idea that those lights might be more interesting if they too would be choreographed to each song, just like those sleeves were.

Luckily for me, I was working for the organisers of the conference where Paul was delivering a talk right around the time he had this idea. We got to talking and realised there was a strip of video on those DVDs that wasn't being utilised. With a record sleeve being square and having these stored on a medium with a 4:3 ratio, that left 1/4 of unused space.

So we went ahead and built some magic. Paul was taking care of getting the light choreographies encoded as MIDI and previewed using Quartz Composer, while I wrote a little configurable program using Processing that would then read these encodings and generate a strip of video that could go onto the unused space on the DVDs.

So we went ahead and built some magic

Now for the fun part, we still needed to get those encodings to be transmitted to the lights somehow. For this I wrote a patch in Max/Msp that would take in the video feed, cut it up, analyze it and spit out MIDI over to the lighting engineer's desk that would then translate it to DMX... Which didn't work. The performance was simply not high enough to get the desired effect.

So we gave up, right then and there. Just kidding. After some pondering, I realised that we could cut out the middleman by sending out DMX straight from Max to the lights using a bit of hardware. ENTTEC DMX USB Pro to the rescue. It was a joy to see those lights dance without delay the first time we tested the setup. It was a blast seeing it a second time on the grassy fields of PukkelPop that year.

Things I learned

• If you're going to control lights, just go for DMX straight away. Going over MIDI really seems silly in hindsight, but well, live and learn.
• Lighting engineers mightn't want to try to be your best friend, if what you're doing is kind of automating their job. Fast forward nine years and turns out that might not be lighting engineers alone...