Announcing Visibox: An Instrument For Video

I’ve always been interested in the intersection of video and music. As any Hollywood director knows, adding music to a scene adds emotion and depth. But as a member of the MTV generation, I’ve also experienced it the other way around. Adding visuals to music creates an immersive and more memorable experience than music on its own.

In the early ’00s, I started a band in the genre that we were calling “indie-rock-tronica”. In order to accommodate all of the synth tracks and drum-loops that we’d created in the studio, we performed with a pre-iPod mp3 player running backing tracks on stage. It quickly occurred to me that we could turn these backing tracks into full-fledged videos which would play in sync with the band. I enlisted several filmmaker friends to create videos. Then my brother Neil and I collaborated on a simple app that he built in a pre-Flash technology called Director. 

We started bringing a laptop and video projector to our gigs. As long as our drummer didn’t get off the click track, the videos would play in time with the band. Things on the screen could flash in time with the music or sync up however we wanted. It was pretty amazing. But if I forgot the lyric to the first verse, or I forgot that the first chorus was half as long as the others, and we were heading for a train wreck. Also, if a song felt too slow during a gig, I was looking at several hours of editing to change the backing track, change the videos, and re-output everything – just to try it a few BPMs faster at the next show.

So when Keith, the bass player in my latest band, 123 Astronaut, said, “Can we do that cool video thing that your last band was doing?” my first response was, “No way! I can’t play with a click track again. That was way too stressful.” But I’m an inventor at heart. I like solving problems. So my mind started going. What if I could make a system where the video could be played like an instrument? Instead of the performers needing to play in time with the video, what if we could basically edit together video clips in real-time on stage?

I’ve been looking for software like this for the past 25 years. The closest thing are VJ apps, but they tend to be expensive, complicated, and you can’t just drop in videos from your phone or downloaded from the Internet. Over the years, I’ve tried just about all of them, but they seemed to be complex-and-technical solutions that generated complex-and-technical output – good for electronic dance music – but misaligned for other genres where you don’t want the visual content to upstage the performer.

I pieced together a quick-and-dirty proof-of-concept on an old Mac laptop using some of Apple’s development tools and 123 Astronaut played a bunch of shows with it. Keith had a MIDI foot pedal in front of him and he could control the videos on stage. The verse started and we were flying over the ocean. The chorus came up, he hits the pedal, and we’re now flying over a field of flowers. It was pretty much as amazing as the click-track videos, but we could play fast if we wanted, and I could forget all the lyrics and just let the band vamp. The videos would loop until I remembered the lyrics and Keith hit the next pedal.

When the pandemic hit, the shows stopped. I watched a LOT of Netflix for the first six months. But in September, I decided to sit down and create a more robust version of this video system. I thought maybe it would take me a couple of weeks. But as I started prototyping and laying it out, I started realizing that maybe other performers were looking for the same thing I was – an easy-to-use but professional application to allow performers to control visuals on stage. I got really excited about creating the application that I’d dreamed about. But as any good product or software designer knows, it’s hard to make things easy to use. I’m now 10 months into my 2-week project and most of my work has gone into keeping the complexity hidden.

My goal was to create a musician-friendly, intuitive video/audio control system that is also professional, road-ready, and flexible. I wanted an app where someone with only a minimal amount of technical knowledge could take a folder with a dozen short video clips and images and assemble an entire set-list of visuals in just a few minutes. I wanted an app that a cafe performer could use to enhance their solo acoustic performance, controlling the visual elements with a MIDI pedal.

The result is Visibox. It’s an application for Mac and Windows computers. You can run it on just about any laptop. Connect it to one of the old video projectors your company has piled up in the supply closet and you’re ready to melt some eyeballs. You can use it with our without backing tracks or a click track. You can use it with our without a MIDI controller. You can connect USB cameras or use your laptop’s webcam and show that as part of your performance.

Download Visibox and try it free for 14 days. Let me know what you think. There’s an item in the Help menu to download the Example Project so you can get a feel for things quickly. Drag around the existing clips or drag in some content of your own. Hook it up to a video projector, a TV, or just a second monitor and run it in full screen.

You can get 50%-off Visibox through July 31st, 2021 with this code in the checkout:
FRIEND-OF-JEFF

I want to put a video projector into every tour van. I want to make video projectors standard equipment at all performance venues. Visuals like these are ubiquitous for arena performances, but with Visibox, club and cafe performers now have the ability to be as creative with the visual aspect of their performance as they are with the music.

Thanks to Darrel O’Pry for helping out with a lot of the heavy lifting in dealing with APIs, server infrastructure, and continuous integration workflows – and generally being my go-to-guy on this project. Also thanks to Brad Woodard for helping draft the logo and the overall look/feel of the Spaceage brand. And thanks to my wife Jennifer Robbins for helping with the Visibox manual, and generally putting up with me being hunched over my computer for the past 10 months.

I’ve got a lot of ideas for the future of Visibox as a product and Spaceage as a company. I hope that this 1.0 release is well received so I can put together a team to support and nurture it, and start to implement all of the other ideas I have to make this awesome thing even more awesome.