Manufacturer	Edirol
Website	Edirol CG8
Price	£3000
Rating	Select ratingPoorOkayGoodGreatAwesome Your rating: None Average: 5 (2 votes)

See the sound. Hear the visualsVJ MONDO/bodydataspace

We were kindly asked to demo Edirol's CG8 for a few weeks and to take the visual synthesiser though its paces.

Not being hardware geeks by any means we came at this expensive piece of kit from the stance of a VJ performer faced with a medium sized nice-looking piece of kit with lots of buttons, knobs and a fairly digestible operations manual.

We invited six different VJs and DJs to our studio to experiment with the product over several nights and we held an Open Process evening for others to turn up and twiddle the knobs and to go through what we had uploaded. We took rough notes during the test sessions and recorded our eventual output in video and photo format.

We feel we got a good broad range of opinions from a variety of people including artists, scientists and punters, some not completely involved in the VJ scene and some heavily ensconced in it.

We patched the CG8 into an Edirol V4, which outputted straight into a projector, though we strongly recommend an output monitor directly from the CG8. The V4 gave us the ability to luma-key other visual inputs.

Here is our preliminary view of it.

Looks
We like the look of the CG8. Sits pretty stable on the desk, it has a bank of 5x4 illuminated soft press buttons that reminds us of the Korg Kaoss pad, a jog wheel, a scratchpad, an infra-red D-beam and an array of modulating knobs, and sampling switches. (Apologies for the non-tech terms)

It weighs about 6kg and is not the sort of thing that you would ram into your rucksack for a quick gig. This is a serious piece of kit that deserves its own flight case and a serious VJ to use it.

The overall gist
This product originally sprung from the Roland music arm of the a/v business and as such has the programming background logic of a musician not a VJ for starters. There is the whiff of the boys from Digitalstage/Glamoove through this product; some of the effects are pure Japanese synth-pop àla Motion Dive.
The idea is that the CG-8 is set to do the same for the visual artist as the audio synth did for the likes of Brian Eno well that's the hope.

A sampling synthesizer takes audio in or regenerates it from a wave generator and then modulates it with filters and amplifiers before outputting the final sound piece. In a similar fashion the CG-8 takes still images, creates motion pictures from these and then modulates them with modifiers and a fade controller.

It's sounds easy to grasp, and does have a user-friendliness of sorts, once you get into the logic of it all, but like any good work it takes time and a lot of thought about initial content before pressing any buttons. Our first foray into the depths of this machine gave passable yet boring results and we found we had to sit down and work out just what we needed in terms of good jpeg content.

Picture input
You start with picture files (JPEG's) as the prime source and stamps (PNG) used for overlays (white on black logos for starters graduating to full colour alpha masks if you are brave enough). Use of Photoshop is essential.
The best size images we used were approx 1280 x 960 @ 150dpi anything larger and the CG8 struggles to down res the uploads to its handy designated size of 512 x 384! The interface is a simple USB interface that takes all sorts of normal camera flash cards, SD, Compact etc.
A word of warning ensure all files are labelled with no spaces in the names!

We found the best images are high contrast, fat saturated graphics. Beautiful complex super-dense photos didn't work as well. The upload sequence is a real bind, each image having to be carefully loaded into the picture bank one-by-one. This is an area that needs looking at and upgrading.

In the basic yet odd navigating menu system (it has a Linux OS backbone), you create a project name in one of the 16 project banks, (the CG8 comes with 5 projects already assigned with the likes of clips from Addictive TV, Dimension 7, 4youreyes, Glamoove and Edirol)

Within your project you are able to upload a max of 3 banks of 16 images and one bank of 16 stamps. We eventually assigned images of similar content into rows of fours which allowed us to flip through content themes during a set.

Using the built in computer graphics, all stored on the 40Gb internal hard drive, the CG-8 adds any of more than 200 Photo effects and then from more than 60 Overlay effects before finally passing the output to the image modifiers which let you add further motion along X/Y/Z axes and control background colour/hue shifting. This final modulation can control rate, depth and waveform just like the LFO in an audio synth.

Sounds simple once you get your head around the manner of accessing the effects banks. This is where the majority of frustration with the CG8 comes from.

There are 16 effects banks with 16 effects. Yet only a good five or so banks deal with your original jpegs! The others banks are filled with clever particle effects that would make any discerning VJ with innovative aims cringe! Well any that aren't into psy-trance perhaps! These particle effects are flavoured candyfloss and bubble-pop, just too much of the stuff you see everywhere but done quite well admittedly. It took several days to get into these effects and actually find anything useful and that is when the realisation dawns that this is what the instrument does so get used to it!

There is nothing here effects wise that a clever software programmer couldn't churn out from a bedroom laptop and to be honest the CG8 will not appeal to that strata of VJ in terms of clever output, but like the Korg Kaoss pad there is more than meets the eye and it takes much less time to get animated effects than software does.

Patches and Banks
The intention of the machine is to get you to make banks of patches (lots of thought involved here as it's pretty crucial to a VJ set to get a good flow of imagery).

There are 8x16 photo patch banks available we only managed to fill half of that which was more than enough for a two hour set. Remembering that those patches still only get generated from the original 48 jpegs from the original project.

We realised early on that these standard effects demanded a particular type of image, e.g. an image is mapped externally around a sphere which then can be modulated in XYZ dimensions, speed and colour to bounce and rotate wherever you want it.
A b&w world map jpeg immediately worked (courtesy of addictive tv) and with a mapped moon image too, it was possible to create and save a patch with earth/moon spheres rotating on the screen in high quality with no noticeable pixelation.

Other standard effects included tunnels, tubes, cubes, spheres etc and more impressively frequency sound-responsive effects. Though I hate trance tunnels we managed to save a fair few patches that used such an effect well given that the image we started with worked well. An architectural elevation with black background suddenly became a sublime tubular cityscape. We found ourselves saying Mad Max , and Future sounds of London a lot!

We also experimented a lot with fabric textures, hand gestures, iconic spiritual imagery and road signs which all found effects that extended their compositional resonance. We ended up with patch banks filled with full-on storylines incorporating sonically excited bouncing Buddha's in front of a variety of surreal landscapes.

Along with the stamp patches we were able to overlay further titles and imagery though the stamp effects were pretty benign and commercially aimed. e.g. bouncing, spinning, exploding logos etc

This is the area of greatest use. Triggering pre-made patches, adjusting their modulation and changing the pictures within the designated patch. Quick triggering of patches and pictures can give the effect of a video input especially if images triggered are sequential. There is a lot of good play to be had here.

Mind you, it is quite hard to recall let alone call up that perfect photo patch or effect. Quite often there was frantic button pushing in an attempt to get rid of an offending stamp patch and trying and find that wicked effect. Was it bank 9 effect 6 or bank 6 effect 9?
And how many times were we lured into bank 5 effect 3 to shouts of frustration.

Even when you are scrolling through the image bank swapping jpegs onto the pre-made effect, it is difficult to achieve without continuously having to glance down at your hands to make sure you are not hitting the wrong buttons. It pays to rehearse all the patch banks well before a live situation.

Longer visual sets would necessitate having to switch to another project bank full of pre-rendered patches. This little manoeuvre takes at least two minutes to achieve and is a frustration, though any skilful performer would fade to another source.

Modulation
This is not a machine to go manic on rampant knob-twiddling, jog shuttling like a loon, and waving your hand at the D-beam only makes those beautifully crafted photo patches look silly. This is a machine that likes being finely tuned, to achieve that perfect balance and harmony to the music. We played everything from ambient to nosebleed jungle with fairly good success in terms of imagery association, though I would strongly recommend you find out what music the CG8 is accompanying many days before a gig!

All these little features are adjustable and assignable to your whim. We hade the left D-beam on colour and the right beam on rotation though it was possible to assign it to scroll through the images.

There is an optional foot pedal modulator but that would be freaky. It was hard enough knowing what we were doing half the time. It was harder to get back to the root patch after five minutes of modulation madness. There was only one moment when we crashed an effect through over modulation and that left a sphere bouncing oddly in the corner of the screen, only to recover through a reboot.

Audio synch
The audio-synch is via a line feed or an internal microphone and is good, with responsive real-time changes noticeable. All audio effects worked very well though we did wish for fine tuned bpm manipulation. We did not attempt MIDI/V-Link triggering in this test as time was against us though this is probably one of the more fruitful benefits of the CG8, as a tool for the serious a/v composer or group. For a musician, the idea of combining the midi output for tunes to video to make visual representation of what is being created would be a good creative avenue. An area we will play further in the future.

Conclusion
The CG8 is an instrument, and like an instrument deserves practice and a level of time and skill to master. It's not a plug and play toy, though it does allow for fun once you get into its workings. It has the ability to do what an MX50 or V4 does (i.e. wipes, fades, mixes) in the same way that a computer can add up two numbers but you don't use your computer to do that generally do you!

Yes, it's a shame it cannot do the same with video as it does with still images but one day it may well do. We had the feeling we were playing with version 1.0 and that v2.0 would be along soon.

The CG8 has a defined set of parameters and effects that are pure and obvious CG8, in the same way that Motion Dive is stuffed with obvious Glamoove effects. Yet theoretically you could never perform the exact same set twice given the pre-made effects bank and some instinctive modulation.

We would have liked to see more integrated image effects (as opposed to particle effects), perhaps created by veejays who like playing with such source code. I had the feeling that there was a rush to fill the effects banks before release a bit more work here on looking at the depth and variety of potential effects and the CG8 would be even more useful.

It's a sexy and clever piece of kit but who can afford its high starting price? We are still unsure who could/would purchase this though it would be fine for a medium size theatre with some cash, maybe even as part of the visual set-up for an evangelical church? There aren't so many rich promoters, veejays or a/v acts out there, but there may soon be, and prices do drop. We were fortunate to have had the chance to test-drive this nippy kit, and should you stumble across one, you should give it a good go too.

From a business perspective - this is an amazingly powerful tool for companies that organise brand sponsorship at events. A CG8 with brand logo's and imagery that communicate the brand personality, would make highly engaging / reactive installations within clubs or at parties / festivals just using the internal microphone...again midi triggering could take it to a higher level.

As good as the CG8 is, it is not enough by itself. Like any good instrument the CG8 needs good accompaniment in the form of other means of content generation. We successfully patched Motion Dive, VDMDX, pre-recorded dv footage, live camera and other VJ software into the mix (via a V4). There were moments when we all were startled with the final mix results and to be honest that's what we all wanted to be astounded.

Would we use the CG8 in a performance - without a doubt, though others begged to differ. It suits a particular style of content manipulation and performance. If you are one of those happily hidden within the keys of your laptop playing with softwares then this is perhaps not for you.

edirol CG8

140905

MONDO
bodydataspace

Many thanks to Edirol, bodydataspace, 8GG, Narrative Lab, El Spiros, Mojo, Monkaiboy, Addictive TV, Holly, VJ Forums and others who twiddled and giggled.