I downloaded the trial of CoGe VJ a couple weeks ago and have been majorly impressed. It’s a smart software purchase when it comes to creating and manipulating visuals. The trial is really accessible, I believe the only limitation is saving your own presets, but you’re going to want to save your own presets once you start playing with the software.

The great thing about CoGe VJ is it’s only as much UI as you need when you need it, and you can create visuals from nothing through use of their different players and generators, which is what we’re going to do in this article so we can create our cool video synthesis example.

In CoGe VJ any UI that you are going to interact with is an interface that you will create from the interfaces menu. For the sake of this tutorial we’re going to need a clipsynth and an effectchain, so go ahead and create those from the interface menu.

At the top of your clipsynth there is a button that says “fxchain on”, click it to enable our fxchain on this clipsynth. Inside your clipsynth you will see a diagonally striped area that says “right-click on the striped area to add PLAYER”. Do that and add a checkerboard. Click the name of the checkerboard to turn it on and you should see something come up on your main and preview output.

Now in your effectchain you are going to see a similar striped area that says “right-click on the striped area to add FX”. Do that and add a sine warp tile from the tile effect menu. Click the name of the sine warp tile and you should see it take effect in your main and preview outputs.

This is great and all but it’s not moving so to remedy this we’re going to right click on the rotation slider of the sine warp tile and from the LFO menu we’ll select sin32. Then do the same thing for the angle slider. After you’ve done that click the button to the right of each slider. You should now see movement in your main and preview output.

Here’s where you can start experimenting. The clipsynth has many different generators, star shine and sunbeams to name a couple, create some new generators inside your clipsynth like we did earlier, toggle your different generators on/off by clicking on their name. Look for something you like and play with the parameters to taste.

Do the same with the effectchain, add in some new effects, toggle them on/off by clicking their names. Even control their order in the chain by clicking the left/right arrows to the left of their name. Once you’re happy with what you’ve created you’re ready to do something with your video.

What to do though? Well one thing we can do is record it with Syphon Recorder, which I detail how to do in an earlier tutorial, but another thing you can do if you are a Lumen user is have your CoGe VJ video act as an oscillator source.

With your CoGe VJ running in the background, open your Lumen software to a new patch. Go to the patch panel and under external connections select “CoGe – Master Mixer” from the dropdown menu next to “Aux in A”. Click and drag the “Aux in A” to the “Camera In” of oscillator A. Now go to the knobs panel and click the left most button under the frequency knob of oscillator A until it says Cam and there you go.

In future tutorials I plan on covering other interfaces available within CoGe VJ, but now you should be able to create your own video synthesis clips in CoGe VJ and integrate them into your Lumen projects.