Hey guys,

I'm the drummer/motion designer for a post-rock band called 'The Clouds Will Clear'.
Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with live visuals at all.
I'm looking for a quite simple and convenient solution to trigger a backing track (to FOH/monitor), a click track (to my monitoring) and visuals (rendered movies to a projector) in sync.

What got first into my mind is some kind of an 'older' iPod with an adaptor.
Render the videos for each track with stereo audio (left channel = backing, right channel = click).
Besides that this seems quite fidgety, I'm pretty sure this is not the solution I want to go with.

What I want to have is:

• be able to trigger everything via my sticks, without touching anything
• fade to some kind of 'pause movie' between the songs
• lightweight/handy solution

Any thoughts or recommendations on this topic would be much appreciated!

Hi,

Exactly what we are doing. Take a look here YouTube to see what I mean. So, how to do it, you will need the following:

1. A reasonably powerful laptop with a HDMI socket and at least TWO USB sockets.
2. A USB to DMX adapter (Lixada, about 15 quid off eBay)
3. Cubase Elements or similar budget DAW that can cope with one video channel
4. Freestyler, light controller package
5. A MIDI pipe such as loopbe1 (Windows) or midipipe (OS X)
6. One or more DMX lights (naturally! )

Install Freestyler, Cubase and loopbe onto the laptop. Run up freestyler and configure your stage setup
Now assign the required scene start commands to be sent out when freestyler sees the relevant MIDI Note ON
Into Cubase, create Audio tracks for your backing and click
Create a video track for your visuals
Create a MIDI track to output your lighting cues

Once this is all done, set Cubase into plzay mode and watch your show render in real time, synced to the click

Hope this helps

Graham (Elysium Sky)... I am the guitarist on the right as you look at the video in the above clip. I also do the band sound and lighting as I am the only techie, all the others are “creative” types

...you will also need a projector and screen/monitors/other video rendering device in order to display the video from the laptop hdmi once you have set the Cubase video player to on (F8) and made it full screen on the extended display that automatically appears when you plug in the projector.

Found another vid that shows off the rig a bit better. YouTube

Also, should mention our drummer starts each song using a USB foot pedal but I suppose you can assign drum pads to do the same thing.

Putting an AV clip in the gap between songs is as simple as leaving space between songs in the Cubase timeline and adding a video to play in the gap.

I will reply to myself again if I think of anything else ?