(Information provided courtesy of Wikipedia)
A VJ is a performance artist who creates moving visual art (often video) on large displays or screens, often at events such as concerts, nightclubs, and music festivals, and usually in conjunction with other performance art. This results in a live, multimedia performance that can include music, actors or dancers as well as live and pre-recorded video.
Often using a video mixer, VJs blend and superimpose various video sources into a live motion composition. In recent years, electronic musical instrument makers have begun to make specialty equipment for VJing.
VJing developed initially by performers using video hardware such as videocameras, video decks and monitors to transmit improvised performances with live input from cameras and even broadcast TV mixed with pre-recorded elements. This tradition lives on with many VJs using a wide range of hardware and software available commercially or custom made for and by the VJs.
VJ hardware can be split into categories –
Source hardware generates a video picture which can be manipulated by the VJ, e.g. video cameras and video synthesizers.
Playback hardware plays back an existing video stream from disk or tape based storage mediums, e.g. VHS tape players and DVD players.
Mixing hardware allows the combining of multiple streams of video e.g. a Video Mixer
Effects hardware allows the adding of special effects to the video stream, e.g. Colour Correction units
Output hardware is for displaying the video signal, e.g. Video Projectors, LED walls, or Plasma Screens.
Today's VJs have a wide choice of off the shelf hardware products, covering every aspect of visuals performance, including video sample playback (Korg Kaptivator), real-time video effects (Korg Entrancer), scratchable DVD players (Pioneer DVJ-X1 and Pioneer DVJ-1000) and 3D visual generation (Edirol CG8).
