Arkaos Content Packs

So you’ve wanna be a VJ? You’ve bought your copy of Arkaos…or Resolume…you have your laptop all fired up and ready to go…now what? You need clipz! MPEGS, JPEGS, Flash animations, 3D animations…you get the picture… Of course you could go out with your DV camera and shoot nicely lit, nicely exposed footage in prime locations…if you have a DV camera and access to prime locations…or you could get down with some serious computer graphics software…or, if you lack the facilities and technical abilities to do either, you could spend ages searching for stuff to download, but you’d be wasting valuable time that would be far better spent reading The Technofile and my blog.

Another alternative is to buy pre packaged content. Arkaos have a range of homemade titles that can be downloaded or purchased on CD. Each title is about 300 meg in size, so if you want to go for the download option, you’ll need broadband and a burner, as you’ll want to back up your newly acquired content…especially if you want to use it to ‘play out’. But so long as you have these, downloading is a good money saving option…and a far better bet than relying on the British postal service…

MC Rebbe The Rapping Rabbi reviews Arkaos Artgrounds content pack in The Technofile‘Artgrounds’ comprises 15 short clips of computer generated backgrounds including undulating neon and white lines (love those white lines…), swirling morphing diamonds, pans and zooms through multicoloured polygons and across fiery red clouds and a mixture of morphing multicoloured shapes patterns and textures. There’s also, for some bizarre reason, a movie of a toilet door??? Loop or scratch any of these movies and you have instant background fodder. Slap on some effects and stick them in a mix to take them to a whole new level.

MC Rebbe The Rapping Rabbi reviews Arkaos Art Mood content pack in The Technofile ‘Artmood’ also offers computer generated imagery, but unlike ‘Artgrounds’, which is all about abstract and geometric digital backgrounds, ‘Artmood’ fuses computer graphics with video for that pre VJ’d look. There’s landscapes, a meteor shower, a digital mirror ball, a fractal sequence and some heavily effected footage of everyday things like the sky, a train departure board and the outside of a strip club…well a strip club’s everyday for me…though trains aren’t, as I travel everywhere by limo…

MC Rebbe The Rapping Rabbi reviews Arkaos Girly Dance content pack in The Technofile Talking of strip clubs…’Girly Dance’ seems to have lots of crotch shots of scantily clad gyrating women. Alright, I’m exaggerating, it has several, together with several abstract patterns, some digital fireworks and snow. Possibly a slightly odd combination. I’d like to have seen more girlys dancing…and more crotch shots…but when wouldn’t I…it’s all good stuff though and the five sequences of dancing girlys work well live.

MC Rebbe The Rapping Rabbi reviews Arkaos Digiackgrounds content pack in The Technofile Completing the trilogy of computer based content packs is ‘Digitackgrounds’, which is midway between ‘Artgrounds’ and ‘Artmood’, but is more abstract than either. As Arkaos say, it plays very well with Techno, Trance & electronic music, as it contains loads of bright shiny flashing multicoloured imagery.

MC Rebbe The Rapping Rabbi reviews Arkaos Follow Me content pack in The Technofile In complete contrast, ‘Follow Me’ is filled with mono sequences of ‘a European city’. It contains some rapid zooming of urban architecture…which doesn’t really do it for me and some speeded up drive throughs of tunnels and street scenes…which kinda does.

MC Rebbe The Rapping Rabbi reviews Arkaos Sann Francisco Paris content pack in The Technofile More city footage can be found on ‘Paris’, which, like the French, is probably best avoided… unless you have a real need for some not very good footage of The Eiffel tower. There’s a women…a man…and some shots of the aforementioned obelisk…and that’s pretty much it…apart from a couple of cool scratch sequences, but they aren’t really enough to justify a purchase. ‘San Francisco’ features the same couple that appear in ‘Paris’ (they get about a bit) and is dominated by sequences of The Golden Gate Bridge that are of a higher standard and more usable. Since sending me these two individual content packs to review, Arkaos have merged them into ‘Paris San Francisco’, which is probably a wise move…

MC Rebbe The Rapping Rabbi reviews Arkaos New York content pack in The Technofile My favourite of the city packs is, of course, ‘New York’, not just because it’s New York, but also because it does a good job of capturing the bright lights, bridges and skyline of Manhattan, with a wide variety of speeded up, slowed down, blurry and pre mixed sequences.

MC Rebbe The Rapping Rabbi reviews Arkaos Skate In content pack in The Technofile Which just leaves Skate In, by Vincent Raimbault. If you have Arkaos 3, you’ll already be familiar with some of the footage it contains and in addition to the 9 clips of a skater dude, there’s also 11 digital backgrounds and an SWF saying ‘motion control’.

Overall, I have mixed feelings about these content packs. On the one hand, there’s more than enough stuff to get you going as a VJ, both for practice purposes and playing out and some of it is very good. On the other hand, I expected more and longer clips (on average, each title contains no more than a dozen sequences, which are, at most, only a few seconds long), better quality video footage (‘Paris’ and parts of ‘Skate In’ and ‘Follow Me’ leave a lot to be desired)…and of course, more girlies. But at 20 Euros/24 Dollars per title, at least some of these have to be worth adding to your collection.

You can view clips of all of these titles on the Arkaos web site, as well as various other third party ‘artist’ packs.

MC Rebbe The Rapping Rabbi awards Arkaos content packs three and a half bagels in The Technofile

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