Arraial Chill :-)

Last saturday Filipe Nabais welcomed DJ Bruno (photo) and I to go do some video and chill-out music.

We were invited to have dinner at their small arraial corner near Praça da Alegria. It was fuckin'hot, the city was silent and you just cold smell the grilled sardines...

It was perfect for a cold beer. The sardines salad was just great. Thanks Filipe, Joana and Mariana :-)

Summer On the Rocks party

With an incredible 34ºC at night, the Summer On the Rocks party packed the Cidadela fortress in Cascais with more than 5.000 people.

The disco welcomed 4Connection, a new project with four old-time DJs that are now re-mixing 80's hits with house rhythm.
An explosive mixture and what a great sound! Then came Álvaro "Electricista", who pumped the night until 4h, that's when the police arrived and closed the party. Everybody was so excited, the party could have continued until 8, but hey...
Met a lot old friends and sang all the old musics like crazy!

Flying House - a new space in Lisbon

It began several years ago with a private club near the airport of Lisbon. It was a 600m2 basement of a building and it only opened its doors few times each year for big, memorable, private parties.

In the meantime the whole building got empty and we found ourselves with a 600m2 disco + 800m2 empty garage + 800m2 x 3 stores + fabulous terrace with overview to the landing lane of the airport and the Tejo river.
So we simply got to work and slowly began transforming one floor into a private hostel for friends, foreign musicians and surfers that want to have a short stay in Lisbon (opens soon!), a small mercadillo and a big chill-out room for small performances.
The disco is ready to pump as any major event comes along and now we are starting to focus on the terrace. So, our aim is to open a special place in Lisbon, aimed at artists, musicians and urban-art dwellers, providing a unique playground for experimentation and knowledge exchange.

Newer posts will follow, stay tuned!
Soon we will launch a simple website with all the basic info.

PS - We are trying to put up an open-door day somewhere in July, just for friends and potentially interested people in the concept, willing to participate with their art and knowledge to make this a unique place...
Send an e-mail to info@videomorphose.com if you wish to collaborate.

PS2 - These photos were taken during a tryout of the projection beamers location and space layout

New recording Hardware for VJs

Recording your live performance is always a stress. Either you plug in an output from your Edirol-V4 directly to a video Camera and then convert the video into any digital file, or you do it directly through a Canopus, but not on HD. VJing is now seriously getting into HD, and for that matter we need more accurate equipment. Here are some of the news in the market:

VERY PORTABLE RECORDER!

Now you can capture analog video from VHS, Video-8, video cameras and more, direct to the H.264 file format as used by iPod™, iPhone™, Apple TV™ and YouTube™. Blackmagic Video Recorder plugs directly into your computer’s USB and includes easy to use software. Get the highest quality video capture from any component video or regular video device. Blackmagic Video Recorder eliminates time consuming processing because it captures into the native file format of your mobile device. Only 149 USD!

NEW EDIROL HARDWARES

The new Edirol VC-50HD provides bi-directional conversion between SD/HD-SDI to and from DV and HDV and MPEG-2. That means you can capture video easily in HD or HDV, backup videos, archive live performances, record to Blu-ray – whatever.

Edirol has also launched another recorder, the F-1. Is is the ideal addition for any videographer or producer wanting to accelerate their workflow by capturing HDV or DV directly to a hard drive in the field.

AJA IO-EXPRESS

The AJA IO-Express has HDMI in/out, component and HD-SDI, and component input. No composite or S-Video here, and allows your laptop to ingest the following formats from a laptop (DVCPRO HD, DV25/DV50, SD Uncompressed, Apple ProRes 422 and SD and limited HD).
AJa’s earlier IO boxes all support standard QuickTime Capture Components, which means that any software that uses QuickTime Capture should have no problem seeing and bringing in video. In other words, these are not meant just for Final Cut Pro. VDMX, Resolume, Jitter, Quartz Composer, etc. should all be able to use the Io-Express. The Io-Express is expected to retail for about 1.000 USD.

THE NEW MATROX MXO2-MINI

It is a similar product, but may be closer to what visualists seek. It has HDMI, Component, Composite and S-Video (Y/c) inputs, and supposedly supports true uncompressed 1080 (they do not specify interlaced or progressive in their spec sheet). This means the Mini is really V4 friendly, and will work with your legacy analog standard-def video gear.

Matrox also states the MXO2-Mini supports standard QuickTime components, meaning all your standard QuickTime-friendly VJ applications ought to be able to capture from the Mini. Matrox does state that the Mini supports 10-bit HDMI capture, which hints at HDMI 1.3 support. That in theory means RGB capture from DVI. The MXO2-Mini is a much more VJ-friendly 450 USD.