VIDEOS
Real-time content and VJ craft: authoring and running the live picture
The design half decides what is possible. This half decides what actually happens on the night — which is a different skill, performed under conditions the design half never experiences.
The running half of the craft
three disciplines, all of them under a clockThese three pages cover the running half of the craft: the material, the person playing it, and the lighting rig occupying the same volume of air.
What distinguishes them from the design disciplines is that they happen under time pressure and, in the case of the operator, in front of an audience. A set can be redesigned; a show cannot be re-run. That asymmetry explains most of the working practices described here, the obsessive preparation, the muscle-memory layouts, the strong preference for decisions taken in advance over decisions taken at 1am.
Why running is not the same discipline as designing
Design work has an undo. A scenic drawing can be wrong for three weeks and still be corrected; the cost is time, and time is the one thing a design phase has more of than a show does. Running work has no undo. A decision taken at the desk is wrong for two seconds and then it is history, which changes what a good decision even looks like.
The practical consequence is that operators do not optimise for the best possible frame. They optimise for recoverability, the arrangement in which the largest number of mistakes are survivable. A bank that can be played badly and still look deliberate beats a bank that is brilliant when hit correctly and incoherent when not.
Rehearsal does not fix this, because on most productions there barely is any. A touring show gets a production rehearsal if it is lucky and a line check if it is not, and a festival set gets a changeover. Preparation is what substitutes for rehearsal, and it is the reason these pages read as though they are about filing rather than about art.
The three disciplines, and what each one is blocked by
Content creation is the slowest element in the room and the first thing anybody notices. It is blocked by geometry: nothing can be authored until somebody has decided what shape it lands on, which means it waits on previs and on the mapping that defines its canvas. A content team that receives geometry two weeks early is doing a different job from one that receives it on site.
VJ workflow is the discipline of playing that material against music nobody has heard in exactly this arrangement before. It is blocked by nothing and therefore carries the risk: whatever has not been decided by showtime gets decided live, by one person, in the dark. Most of the craft is in the layout of the clip banks rather than in the playing.
Light programming shares the air with all of it. It is blocked by the rig, which is blocked by what the venue will carry, and it is the department most likely to be told late that the video design has changed. Where the picture is carried on an LED wall rather than projected, lighting and video are also competing for the same black level.
Where the two departments collide
Lighting and video are pointing at the same volume of air, and three arguments follow from that with enough regularity to be worth planning for.
Haze. Haze is what makes a beam visible and it is also what lifts the black level of every projected surface in the building. Lighting wants more; video wants less. There is no correct answer, only a negotiated one, and it is settled by standing in the room and looking.
Who owns the moment. Both the lighting console and the media server can drive pixels, and on a mixed rig both departments have a defensible claim to a given cue. The arrangement that causes least trouble is an explicit written split agreed during previs; leaving it implicit means discovering it during load-in with the clock running.
Locked or live. A timecoded show runs everything against one clock, which is precise and unforgiving. A show that breathes is run by hand, which is responsive and inconsistent. Most large productions are a hybrid (locked sections around free ones) and the seams between the two are where the picture usually falls over.
Preparation is most of the job
Almost everything an experienced operator does happens before the doors open. Clips are named so they can be found without reading. Banks are laid out so the same gesture means the same thing on every song. Anything that requires a decision under pressure has a default that is acceptable if the decision is never made.
The tools reward this in different ways. An instrument assumes clips, layers and a tempo, and that assumption is exactly what lets it be played without looking. Real-time rendering moves the authoring into the show itself, which is powerful and removes the safety of knowing what the picture will be. A systems tool connects the rest together and is the usual home for whatever the off-the-shelf chain does not cover. Which of the three owns a given job is covered under the toolchain.
The design half of the same craft (the disciplines that decide what any of this is running on) is under stage and scenic design. The productions where these practices were worked out are documented in the archive, and the vocabulary used throughout is in the glossary.
In this section
3 pages- CH 05 VJ Workflow Clip banks organised for the hand rather than the eye, tempo lock, layering, and cutting live to a set nobody has rehearsed. Read →
- CH 06 Content Creation Authoring to a canvas that is rarely rectangular, building loops that survive repetition, and a render pipeline that has to deliver early. Read →
- CH 07 Light Programming Fixtures, palettes and the cue stack, run to timecode, and the negotiation over where the lighting desk stops and the media server starts. Read →
Questions
the things people ask about thisWhat does the video department actually do during a show?
On a timecoded show, monitors and handles exceptions while a media server plays to clock. On a live show, performs: selecting, layering and cutting the picture in response to the music. Most touring shows are a hybrid of both within the same evening.
Why is content the schedule risk?
Because it is downstream of geometry and upstream of everything visible. It absorbs every delay above it and passes none on, so it is the discipline most likely to be compressed, and the one that shows when it is.
Do lighting and video conflict?
Constantly, because they share the air. Haze makes beams read and simultaneously lifts the black level of every projected surface. The productions that handle it well settle the argument during previs rather than during load-in.
Can a VJ prepare for a set they have not heard?
Only structurally. Learn the shape (where that artist tends to place breakdowns, how long their builds run) and build banks that can move up or down in energy from anywhere. Never build a cue that only works if the next eight bars are what you expect.