1 Point Oh! News

Hahahah Well, I thought I’d give an update since I haven’t in something like 2 months. I’ve been really busy lately with moving from San Diego to Orange County. The really good news about this move is I get my own room for a studio so I can keep trying out stuff with this visuals setup I have going here. The move has been going well — except for when the transmission on my Xterra went out. AAMCO was quoting me $4700 to fix it. Yikes! Fortunately, the warranty decided to cover it (I was worried they would deny it since I have oversize tires and a lift kit). I should be getting that back in a week or so. In the meantime I’ve been rebuilding / reinstalling everything on my computers. That’s probably the biggest nuisance about Windows… I don’t know about you, but I’ve found I have to reformat about once every 2 years in order to keep a high performance machine from turning into a turtle. Bleh.

Where’s all the visuals software for open-source?

So I’ve made it easy for everyone to get themselves on our guest list… simply click the link next to the event you want to go to. This isn’t a guarantee that there will be room for you — its all on a first come first served basis.

I’ve also uploaded a preview of the set I’m going to be playing on Friday, as well as a set from DJ MeloD1k, which is way overdue — and all my fault.

Other than that, I look forward to seeing you all on Halloween!!! I’ll be dj-ing from 8-10pm, and doing visuals all night long. Woohoo! Come on up and say hi!

I don’t know about you, but these last 7 years of living here in the US have not been that great. So… I sent a letter to congress today asking them to impeach Bush and Cheney. If you have a minute, I recommend you pop on over there and do the same. And if you can’t come up with anything to say in the comments section, feel free to copy and paste what I sent!

I personally am APPALLED at how our country has been HIJACKED by the Bush Administration! I can clearly tell my phone conversations are being listened in on without reason. I have directly felt the affect of insane gas prices (btw — we should be regulating this WAY better as I’ve paid as much as $5.20+ and as little as $3.11 IN THE SAME 6 MONTHS!). The Department of Homeland Security… DOHS… well, that pretty much sums it up as everything they’ve done has elicited nothing but a “Doh!” from me. I’m sick of corporate greed, the media fear machine, and what the heck is up with us STILL doing trade with China after all these highly dangerous manufacturing “defects”? Who’s getting a cut from that?

To quote “Network” — I’M MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GONNA TAKE IT ANYMORE!

I refuse to sit on my bum and wait for the Bush Administration to just hand over the reigns because honestly, I don’t think they ever intend to. We’re about 5 steps away from being in a police state and I’ll be damned if that’s the country I grew up in. Unless our government listens to our voices and makes some drastic changes for the better, I’m actively considering relocating to another country as I simply cannot be part of such atrocities.

I am well aware that freedom comes at a cost — but it simply cannot cost us our freedom, or what on earth did we get in trade? Rex-84 camps so we can throw anyone in the nation that disagrees into a concentration camp? Higher taxes to “protect us” from an enemy that we simply cannot define (how many times has “terrorist” been redefined to include our next target already?).

Please listen to us, we put you in office to make our voices heard. I have faith that we can turn this around, but only if enough people are willing.

Well, its been a lot of preparation work already but things are coming along. I’m moving back to Orange County from San Diego. Its been one of those long drawn out decisions, but at least it coincides with my lease. We (my girlfriend and I) are going to try to get into a house in about a month. That’s going to be a really big help! I can’t wait to have my own studio without having to give up having a living room! After that, I’ll be really movin’… I’ll take pics of course and share how I decide to set it all up.

Still working on the dialogue for all those how-to’s. That’s gonna take a while. I didn’t realize exactly how much I had to cover!

Well like the title says, its been an exciting summer! We’ve been doing a few events in the great outdoors – which to be honest with you is where I’d rather be anyway. A couple weeks ago we did one right next to Tahoe that was in the absolutely most beautiful location. There was a stream running through a meadow in the middle of a wooded valley nestled between a couple of mountains just south of the lake. Wow. Maybe I can be a writer after all. I’ve only got a few pictures – I was too busy working at night and my girlfriend was sleeping! Buggers. I’ll try to get what I have up here soon.

Today I added a power consumption calculator — you can find it under the lighting section right now. I’ll probably end up moving it to the “Contact Us” form once I have that done since it isn’t just for calculating lighting. This is something that I think will be really useful since I almost always have to figure out how much power we’ll need for an event. Check it out and let me know what you think!

As I’ve been trying to figure out the basics of what I’m going to cover in my video tutorials, I have very quickly realized there is a lot to cover. So… I’m going to break it out into a few different videos. While I don’t have the whole video tutorial outlined (nor have I decided what is personal intellectual property and unsharable), this should give you an idea of what we have going over here at 1 Point Oh! and perhaps a little more insight into exactly what my vision entails:

1 Point Oh! Visuals Overview

• 3 computers, 1 mission
• Computer #1: Audio – Ableton Live and Propellerhead Reason in Rewire
• Computer #2: Visuals – Motion Dive
• Computer #3: Visuals – Arkaos

Routing Visuals

• Hardware Interfaces
• Software

Routing MIDI

• Hardware Interfaces
• M-Audio Keystation Pro 88
• M-Audio Oxygen 8v2
• E-Mu 1212m
• Software
• Configuring the E-Mu 1212m
• Configuring Ableton Live
• Setting up Rewire to Propellerhead Reason

Visuals as an Audio Additive

• How to choose clips
• How to create clips
• Software
• Pinnacle Studio 11
• Apple QuickTime
• Misc

VJ Tricks

• Working with Motion Dive
• Working with Arkaos
• Why does 1 Point Oh! use both?

Like I said, there’s a whole bag of goodies to cover here and its going to take me a while. Keep this post bookmarked. I’ll update these links with the new videos that I record – heck, I’ll even try to find a permanent home on 1 Point Oh! for this stuff at some point.

So after I got the new touchscreen monitor I decided to try hooking in yet another computer to the chain and routing the video feed from MotionDive into that computer (on which I run Arkaos) and add more visual effects on top of it… then route it over to the 1st computer where I play the music and record the video all at once. Yikes! Gettin’ pretty crazy here, but you know what? The end result is really cool – especially now that I can include a video feed from my video camera so I can walk you all through exactly how this beast works.

Today the touchscreen monitor arrived. This thing is to VJs what a Technics 1200 is to DJs. I can’t believe I ever tried to VJ without a touchscreen!

Anyway, here’s a quick pic of my current studio setup.

For the record, there’s an M-Audio Keystation Pro 88, dual computer setup running dual display on both computers — with a video capture from MotionDive to record the video out so I can burn DVDs. I run Ableton Live and Propellerhead Reason for my composing. When its a full on visuals gig, the music machine turns into an Arkaos box. I’m going to try to get a video demo recorded in the next few days — everything I’ve found with MotionDive on YouTube has been seriously lacking. There’s a ton of features that an advanced keyboard like the Keystation Pro 88 can take advantage of. It’s just amazing!

But to be honest, I think my favorite part is the fake hard drive that hides my GPS transmitter because let’s be honest – insurance doesn’t give me anything extra for all the time I’ve spent customizing this setup.

Today I managed to make my WordPress site blog active. The real trick was getting the blog into the home page. I ended up using an RSS feed from my own blog and running an XSL transformation on it. I dunno about you guys, but that WordPress template system seems pretty whack when all you want is to include the latest X posts. -sigh-

Oh joy! Now I have to figure out how to replace the ellipses with a real link or get the value of a namespaced XML element. It just never ends.