UFO, Black Hawk War from CandyStations on Vimeo.

Jaymis Loveday sits down with Deborah Johnson for Create Digital Motion in a conversation about live visuals for music. Deborah (right), aka CandyStation, is touring with Sufjan Stevens, another of our favorite musicians. (If I could come up with more excuses to bring him into a "digital music" blog, I would.)

It really is a conversation, as Jaymis has plenty of thoughts himself, having toured with Australian Idol Bobby Flynn (and I think the two are kindred in aesthetic).

See Deborah’s visuals above, and check out the full interview on CDMotion:

Interview: Deborah Johnson on Sufjan, Singer Songwriters, and Content

Many artists tour with visuals, but use canned material. Seen any particularly terrific shows with live visuals lately? (Maybe someday we’ll be able to get together a matchmaking service for Create Digital Musicians and Create Digital Motionists — speaking as someone who does do both, it’s not always easy to split energies, and collaboration is more fun!)

Texas, here we come. Before the armies of bands hit Austin for South by Southwest, we’ve got some events going during SxSW Interactive — the “spring break for Web geeks” festival of online tech.

Laptopists battle it out Saturday night 3/8: The Digital Showcase at the Austin Museum of Art is holding a Laptop Battle for Texan laptop artists. I’ll be judging, along with CDM reader favorite (and reader) proem, and two other judges. The night also  features performances from New Berlin and Richard Gear, plus live visuals from CDMotion contributor Dan Winckler. Details at AMODA, upcoming.org. (A paltry $4-$7, and even 18 year-olds can get in.)

Explore creative interfaces for data Sunday 3/9: My panel with interaction design pioneer S. Joy Mountford (Apple, Yahoo) will look at how Web information can become a fluid, artistic medium for visualization and sonification. Details at Create Digital Motion. (Requires SxSW Interactive badge.)

Live CDM music and motion party Monday 3/10: Bring your musical, visual toys, custom code, and DIY projects and hang out with other CDMers at 8pm, then stick around for live performances from musicians and visualists. Details below; let us know you’re coming at upcoming.org, Facebook, SXSWHERE party guide. Free, no badge required.

More on the CDM party — good chance to chill before SxSW Music unloads on you!

The convergence of visuals and sound on virtual vinyl has been a long time coming, but it’s awaited the perfect tool for controlling both. Serato’s VIDEO-SL promised to be that tool. We’ve gotten the crossfader in the capable hands of dj rndm and Robotkid to find out for Create Digital Motion. Here’s what the results look like, mixing:

… and scratching:

The review isn’t without the odd caveat: for one, you’ll need to pluck down a couple grand to get the complete setup because the Rane mixer employed is required, though rndm ultimately says that’s worth it for the integration payoff. And available transitions and effects are limited in range and prefer to run on dedicated GPUs (think MacBook Pro, or a PC laptop with a dedicated NVIDIA or ATI card). But as you can see, the results are incredibly slick, and there’s no question video on vinyl now has a tool to beat. Check out the complete review and technical details on our visualist sister site:

Hands-on Review: Serato’s VIDEO-SL for Visual Vinyl Turntablism

On the video side: HD video is everywhere you look, but working with it live may seem like a far-off fantasy. Enter the Intensity video card. If you’ve got a supported PC or Mac with a free PCI-Express slot, you can mix HD video live for just US$249-349. Max/MSP/Jitter whiz Anton Marini tests the card for CDMusic’s sister site Create Digital Motion:

Review: Real-time, Uncompressed HD Mixing On the Cheap, with Decklink Intensity

The possibilities are tantalizing. Anton uses an HD converter to mix a Mac laptop with visuals generated by a Mac desktop. With the right configuration, you might also mix two external HD streams, and/or output to HD using the card. On the PC side, this could even be portable, using a lightweight SFF PC. Now, if they’d just give us ExpressCard. If you do video as well as music, let us know what you think of the story.

(Side note: the card lives at Polytechnic University, which has what’s turning into a powerhouse program for interactive media. As it happens, it’s also been host to regular Max “patching circles” for any of you in New York. Now, we did actually leave the building last night as a small fire had broken out in the building. We didn’t start the fire, though.)

Peter has disappeared for a well-deserved break. I can’t replace him. I can’t even see myself getting to the place from which I could see the path which would allow me to tell you something about music or audio which he hasn’t already covered at length and in depth. However, I can tell you plenty about the inner workings of the CDM sites. So I’d like to give you a bit of an update on where the site has been going, ask for your feedback on how you use the site, what you’d like to see from us in the future, and pave the way for Peter to talk about some cool new stuff we’ve been working on when he returns.

According to our Basecamp account it has been exactly 1 year since we first started working on the CDM redesign. You remember how CDM used to be don’t you? Internet Explorer users having to scroll down 2 pages before reaching the first content item? Great times! According to our stats only 41% of CDM readers are on IE. You know that it works in IE now, right? You can change back if you really want to…

Around 90% of our visitors are from the USA, followed by the UK, EU, Australia, Canada and Netherlands. Our biggest search terms include “garageband for windows”, “create digital music”, “ipod mixer”, “pro tools”, and “ableton”. This, and the CDM comments feed leads me to believe that this site’s biggest readers are savvy, bleeding edge digital tech gurus and base level newbies who have just learned to type, decided to call themselves DJ SHINY and hunt down an iDJ.

We’re more or less continually working on the site (ok, so we take a break occasionally to laugh at press releases from phone ringtone companies), but occasionally we get really excited and decide to do something big and cool. Last time that resulted in CreateDigitalMotion, which I’m rather proud of. More recently we’ve been working on some new features we hope you’ll like, but that was put together without any consultation from you, dearest reader, you might hate it. So I’d like to get a little feedback on what you’d like to see from the site. How do you use it? What would make coming here a more pleasant experience for you? Which bits of the site do you use/not use. Do you use RSS? Are you happy with Feedburner? Do you have trouble finding information outside of the blog chronology?

Create Digital Music’s sister site has more on live visuals and interactive digital art. Cheating a bit here — it’s actually been two weeks — but it’s the dog days of summer here in the Northern Hemisphere and everyone’s moving a bit slow. Pictured: Dreams in High Fidelity.

We looked at 3dconnexion, the creators of fantastic 3D controllers from the folks who brought us the new Logitech NuLOOQ. If you’ve got Windows, these could be just the thing for your next three-dimensional music outing; Mac users, sadly, need not apply — ain’t no drivers.

Adobe Lightroom is now available in beta in both Mac and Windows versions, and Jaymis discovers even casual photographers might like. To me, it’s a bit like iPhoto Pro in the way Photoshop Elements hadn’t been.

If you’ve already added Commodore 64 sounds to your PC as a PCI card, why not use the other slot to install genuine retro vector graphics, a la Asteroids? I want to see someone VJ with vector; put together that ghetto-fabulous PC minitower and go to town.

The SIGGRAPH show last week in Boston was host to generative art in which, finally, computers really can dream of electric sheep; if that doesn’t strike your fancy, try using Firefox code to create eye candy instead.

But what really stole the show for me was the new MUSE music video, shown below. Try to top this with your own music video, even with a unicorn. It simply can’t be done. What can us indie musicians do to match high-end special effects in mainstream music video releases? Uh, learn After Effects and Maya? Not sure.

After our “beta test” first month, we’re ready to put Create Digital Motion into high gear, so I’m really looking forward to August. (Yes, unlike Web 2.0, we don’t plan to be in beta forever.) See you soon, on motion or music.

Fans of VJing, visuals, and interactivity will want to subscribe to the Create Digital Motion RSS feed, but I’ll be checking in with our sister site to keep more casual readers up-to-date. Here’s the latest from our new site in its early days of operation:

In part II on my series for building a Small Form Factor PC for gigs, I discuss some tips for removing Windows bloat, something that’s sure to appeal to Windows music users, too. (I’m about to do my first music gig with the same machine Tuesday, so we’ll see what happens — first, I need to improve disk performance in Kontakt, but that’s another story.)

If you’ve faced challenges moving around big multimedia files or video files for scoring projects, Jaymis points to some tips.

VJ software updates: Livid has new software for rigging together multiple Edirol V-4 video mixers for eight channels of video goodness, and Resolume 2.4 beta is available with (among other things) DMX support (hear that, theater folk?)

Jaymis looks at guerilla projection, aka photobombing

Create Digital Motion is still teething, but expect it to kick into high gear soon, even if I have to double my espresso dosage. Thanks for your support!