It might just be the biggest article ever about VJs in swedish press. Cap & Design features a 6-page article called “Design on the dance floor” written by Mats AlmegÃ¥rd. It includes interviews with The Midi Thief, Morrsken, Vidots, Joel Dittrich and Bertrand Gondouin. Issue nr 4 is out in the stands now.

There was an interesting discussion today regarding the Sheer video codec on the Modul8 forum where Dave from Vidvox (the creators of VDMX) and Bart from Resolume jumped in on the thread.

Sheer is a commercial codec that looks a bit better than Photo JPEG but results in slightly bigger files. Sheer also has support for alpha channel. The question is – is it worth $149?

Bart from Resolume was saying that the Sheer codec was not that great and accusing David from Vidvox of promoting the codec out of commercial reasons. David already denied any money being involved in his first post.

[Edit] This thread was started in 2005 so the initial posts are pretty old (like Daves and Barts comments), but the last posts with comparison of codecs is from a recent date. [/Edit]

In the same thread you could learn that you could swap the Animation codec for the more modern, faster, smaller PNG codec to get that nice alpha channel.

Read the whole thread here.

Some good news for Resolume users: Resolume has develeoped a new video codec called DXV toghter with The Pixel Addicts and UnitedVisualArtists. DXV is hardware accellerated and will decompress the frames using the video card’s GPU which is faster than using the computer’s CPU as conventional codecs does. This will result in the abillity to mix more video layers with higher resolution.

The codec is cross-platform and will work in all Quicktime enabled applications but the hardware accelleration will only be enabled in Resolume. And best of all, it’s for free. Read more and download the plugin on Resolumes home page.

I just found this (probably old?) comic strip on Rocky’s MySpace page where Mange just started doing video art but Klasse disses him stone cold. It’s couple of good puns in this strip. (Rocky is a swedish cartoon by Martin Kellerman).

The blog Accent Feed lists the 10 most innovative concert visuals of 2008. A must read blog, btw!

I just noticed that they’ve got VJ Central back up and running and this time they are using the Drupal platform. We just have to hope that it won’t get hacked again. This is the version 3 beta and you can’t accuse the site for being good looking but all the old good features seems to be in there. For example I just love the hard and software reviews.

beta.vjcentral.com