Every VJ app seems to use different terminology. In Resolume it’s all about channels, decks and layers. Channels are your visual sources – video clips, flash animations/texts, still images and live video feeds. You get a grid of 20 of these channels, which you fill with material from the built in file browser by dragging & dropping/double clicking. Once you’ve done that you have a ‘deck’ and you get 8 of these decks (accessed from tabs immediately below the deck window) giving you a massive 160 channels on tap at any one time. If that’s not enough for ya, you can save and load decks at the press of a button, something Resolume does very quickly, meaning you need never run out of material during a show.

A layer is…a layer and you can mix up to three at once…which explains why there are three layer windows above the decks. You place the contents of channels in these layers with the mouse or by pushing buttons on the keyboard (computer or midi), all of which are user assignable. The results are seen in the neighbouring preview window as well as on any other monitors/via any other projectors connected to your system (you can have up to three outputs configured to show different combinations of these layers).

Each layer window contains a bunch of different keys that determine how the channel you’ve chosen plays back. You can play material as a continuous loop or as a ‘one shot’ …sorry…too much (Sony) Acid…forwards, backwards or even as a series of random frames (no you can’t do that with your VCR…) or you can sync the clip to the built in 18 band FFT audio analyser and have your visuals respond to any combination of nine different frequency bands! You can even set the ‘in’ and ‘out’ points of the clip. There are 18 different overlay modes and sliders to control the frame rate and opacity (and here’s one that’s not in the manual…if you have a mouse with a scroll wheel, you can rest it over these sliders without clicking and scroll to move them – it works on all horizontal sliders but sadly not the vertical ones). You can also change the stacking order of the layers by simply moving them up or down with a click.

To the left of the layers is a window with five tabs – ‘files’, ‘decks’ ‘sources’ effects’ and ‘audio’. Selecting the effects tab gives you access to over 60 built in effects, as well as ‘Freeframe’ plug ins, a fast growing standard supported by the majority of VJ apps (with some notable exceptions), over 150 of which are currently reckoned to be available. You can apply one effect to each channel simply by dragging and dropping, after which left clicking on that channel will give you access to its midi controllable parameters. This gives the advantage of being able to use multiple versions of the same clip in different channels, each with a different effect (and play order, frame rate, etc).You can also separately apply up to three effects to your final mix of layers, by dragging and dropping FX in the three FX windows at the far left of the screen.

…and that’s about it! Although all keys are user definable, Resolume comes already set up with 20 computer keyboard keys assigned to the twenty channels and the F1, F2 & F3 keys assigned to each layer. Drag some stuff into the channels, start pressing the keys and you’re away in less time than it takes to read this review. Want to reverse the play direction, randomize it or even ‘scratch’ it backwards and forwards? No problem…there are keys ready assigned for that that too…or if you’re feeling really lazy, just hit the ‘chaos’ button and Resolume will do everything for you (well not everything, as it doesn’t randomize frame rate, opacity or effects, which would make this function more versatile, but it will buy you enough time to search for that Rizla…) and naturally you can ‘sample’ the results direct to hard disc then re-use them.

The downside of all this power and versatility is that Resolume can be quite a demanding piece of software and requires as powerful a system as possible, otherwise, once you start using lots of layers and effects together, the software can become a little sluggish and unresponsive. It doesn’t like really big (by which I mean really big) video files, as they tend to crash the program. Also, I found that some flash animations can play a little unpredictably. If you have multiple hard disks or hard disk partitions, the file browser doesn’t see them all (I had to browse my hard disks in two stages instead of one which was a bit of a pain) and decks can only be saved in the default location (instead somewhere of my choosing on my hard drive). But even with these issues, Resolume is excellent. It’s simple enough for anyone to learn in minutes, yet comprehensive enough to take your VJing to the highest level and, used with a sufficiently powerful system, will let you dispense with your video/DVD decks and hardware vision mixer altogether, making it, at 199 Euros, a bit of a bargain!

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