I had my first full day here in Encinitas. First, allow me to introduce the Xochi Media crew:

There’s Brett Spivey, our Fearless Leader and Festival Liasion, VJ Aquine, another Quartz-Composer Evangelista whose brain I will certainly be picking over the next week, and VJ Metamer, our Software Engineer and Hard Drive Wrangler.

Here’s a first look at some of the setup. On the left is the Master Camera Station, which takes in feeds from our four on-stage Security Cameras and two at-station handheld cameras (of slightly higher quality). These two handhelds are switched in manually with a clunk box. The brains of the system sit in a G5 Tower with four video capture cards, which runs a Quartz Composer patch that is stretched over two screens (the previews that you see above are on the left, the output is displayed on the right, which goes out to our video mixers).

On the right is the current layout for my station, running my Four-Layer VDMX Setup out to a V-4, which will then be piped through another mixer or two and then out to the screens.

Brett printed and mounted all the info we’ve got for each performer – what kind of music they play, whether they want visuals, what sort of art/video clips they’ve provided, if any, etc. It’s great to see it all laid out like this, now we can start zeroing in on where we’ve got the most work to do, content-wise.

We ended the day with a walk out to the beach for the sunset. Best. Visuals. Ever.