If the consoles have changed the club continues to trust the 3 ArKaos media servers installed by Sebastien to display visuals on the LEDs of the DJ / LJ booth and on the various Plasma screens around the place. And apparently, Nicolas Bailly put these to a good use: here’s a video from a light show he set up at the club on Pryda’s track “Miami to Atlanta”.

Nicolas also has a very interesting blog (in French) about lighting design, check it out if you want to know more about him.

As you can see it’s all very organized; thanks to the laptop stands he only needs a small table to fit everything and be ready to mix both music and visuals in sync.

Allowing this kind of very mobile setup is exactly what we want to achieve by making GrandVJ a lightweight but powerful video mixing software that can very easily produce great visuals even on a laptop. Actually, it’s so easy that DJ Ron – which was primarily a DJ as you guessed – had no problems to add VJing to his skills without sacrificing his DJ talent..

So if you want to be a professional VJ/DJ, you must have some talent and sense of rhythm, that’s a fact.. Clever organization of your setup is also must, as we’ve just seen. But I know from discussing with DJ Ron on Facebook that all his files are also very carefully organized. When mixing live you certainly don’t want to be looking after that video loop that was on that drive you left home, right?

Have a look at the last picture below, DJ Ron comments:

“For radio mixshows, I use a 320 GB music drive which contains about 15,000 MP3s. For DJ/VJ gigs, I use a 1.5 TB video drive that contains about 7500 music videos.”

“The most important thing to me is keeping a complete backup. I travel with two drives that are mirrored, in case one goes down, I can switch to the other. At home, I have a third mirrored drive in case my bag is stolen or damaged. Take it from me – BACKUP your content. Don’t learn the hard way.”

“I have my own folder system that I use to track music. I am still in the process of converting my CD library to digital – in addition to maintaining the constant influx of new music. I don’t think my system would work for others, but it works for me.”

That’s right, the best way for you to organize your files is probably your way.. But we all can use a little inspiration, so are you using folders or file names? Are you sorting video loops by duration, style, color or length? Feel free to comment and let everyone know your clever way of organizing music tracks and video loops on your drives!

Back in March we featured a show report on the ArKaos web site about the installation made by lighting designer Sebastien Jurkowski at the Zouk Club in Kuala Lumpur.

This impressive setup in a not less impressive venue was the very first time our brand new media server software ArKaos MediaMaster was used in a Club installation and it proved to be a very good and reliable solution since it is now the subject of a 3 pages article and interview in mondo*dr magazine, the international publication for technology in entertainment.

Here is a short video clip from the installation in the main room at Zouk Club, read further below for some interesting parts of the article.

If you’re into clubbing installations be sure to read the full article with all technical details and illustrated with pictures. It is available in the digital version of the July/August edition of mondo*dr at page 54.

The article explains how the club has been refurbished from four rooms to 6 rooms with different music content to suit local clubbing conditions and gather a more sophisticated crowd. Whilst much of the audio system is a reconfiguration of the pre-existing, Sebastien has put a huge effort on the lighting part by bringing together video and lighting technologies to create an impressively immersive whole.

The main Zouk room features a serie of LED screens combining to form a 20 x 1.5m video wall, while the upstairs VIP room (overlooking the mainroom) has its own set of LED walls and Plasma screens . They all display visual content sent from a single ArKaos MediaMaster controlled by a Chamsys MagicQ desk which also controls Kinetic lighting from a Martin Pro rig.

“I first used ArKaos VJ DMX in the Mix Club“ explains Jurkowski. “It was controlled by the MagicQ from Chamsys. Having used it for two years, I realized how powerful these two tools were when working together”. Sebastien was so impressed that he actually joined the ArKaos team for a year, working with us to develop MediaMaster, our next generation media server software.

“Because of my nightclub background I wanted something funky, powerful, easy to use, and with lots of Audio generated visuals, audio triggered, text and bass reactive effects. They created MediaMaster which is controllable by DMX and also the GrandVJ software which is geared more for the Pure VJ acts,” he continues.

“The result of having this groundbreaking software in a club like Zouk which is equipped with LED walls, plasma TVs, and a whole array of lighting effects is quite astonishing. When the DJ plays the music (anything from trance to techno to house and even hip hop), it quite literally makes the visuals on the LEDs and plasmas plus the lighting effects bounce to the beat” (…)

In yet another room, Barsonic, an intimate space for Electro-Indie music has been created: A DJ booth, slashed with light (provided by an embedded LED rope) pulses colour in time to Elation Octostrip LEDs positioned around the room. A Martin Pro LightJockey controls PR Lighting and Martin Pro fixtures whilst MIDI real time video mixing is made possible by Arkaos’ GrandVJ.

With the Stylish VIP venue Aristo, a plush party pad Velvet, and the airy Terrace Bar to complete the line-up, Zouk has once again secured its place at the top of the KL club scene.