Finally! We get to the good bit: playing your chases in Resolume! Chaser comes with a WHOPPING set of twelve plugins and this section will handle each plugin in detail.

Chaser

Chaser is the original classic that started it all. It’s a basic player for the chases you’ve created in its namesake app. All you have to do is animate the Step parameter, by setting it to Timeline or BPM Sync, and set the Sequence parameter to the sequence you want to play.

Of course, each instance of the effect can be tweaked further to perfection.

By changing the Scaling, you change how Chaser scales your content into each slice.

• Fill is the default and it shrinks your content to fill the whole slice, while maintaining the aspect ratio. It crops off any parts that fall outside the slice.

• Mask doesn’t scale your content at all. When chasing, Chaser will cut just holes in your content where each slice is. This mode is best used if you have custom content that already matches the Input Map and you want to use Chaser to add more dynamics to it.

• Stretch stretches your content to fill the slice, disregarding any aspect ratio. In 99% of the cases, this mode is horrible and you should never use it, but maybe you can find some creative use for it.

Sequence controls which sequence this instance will play. Each sequence you created in the app will show up here as a button. If you have more sequences than fit on the screen, Resolume will change the UI to a dropdown.

Tip! Any changes you make to the sequence names or their order, will show up automatically in the plugin. It will also try to keep the active sequence visible, so the visual output doesn’t change abruptly.

You use Step to control which slices are visible. You’ll probably want to animate this to BPM Sync, Timeline or even FFT. But you could also set it on a fixed step to use it as a quick masking effect.

Echoes are a quick way to keep a step visible for longer. For instance, by setting Echoes to 4, each step will remain visible for 4 steps instead of 1, before it fades out. You could get the same result by manually toggling every slice for 4 steps in the app, but come on, ain’t nobody got time for that.

Sustain and Release determine the curve of the opacity fade during each step. By default, they’re set to 0.2 and 0.8, which means each slice will be 100% visible for 20% of the step’s duration. It will then fade out to 0% over the next 60% of the step’s duration and remain completely invisible for the last 20%. By setting them to 0.0 and 1.0, it would fade out from 100% to 0% over the full duration of the step. By setting both to 1.0, there won’t be fading at all and it just hard cuts at the end of the step.

Bumper

Bumper followed quickly on the heels of Chaser and is great for a more hands on percussive approach to VJ’ing.

It has the same options for Scaling as Chaser, so see above. Similarly, you also select a Sequence much the same way.

Instead of an animatable Step slider, Bumper has Next and Previous buttons. You use these to manually tap from one step to the next. This is great for tapping out melodies or hitting musical accents.

There’s also a Blast button, which will cycle through the steps quickly in succession. This is great for building climaxes or going wild on the drop. Blast Speed controls how quickly the steps will play.

Bumper is designed to be played musically. If it doesn’t receive any input for a certain amount of time, it will reset to the first step, allowing you to repeat the melody. You can control after how many seconds it reset with the Reset Delay parameter. You can also disable this feature completely by toggling off Auto Reset.

You control how fast the slices fade out with the Fade Speed parameter. The higher this value, the quicker they will fade out. The fade out curve is defined by the Sustain and Release parameters, described above.

Delayer

DISCLAIMER! Delayer is a beast. It’s very powerful but you should also be very careful with it!

Delayer lets you offset your slices in time. By selecting a Sequence, Delayer will show the slices in the first step with no delay, then work its way through the sequence all the way to the last step, which will have the maximum delay.

That sounds awesome and it is. Keep in mind though that delays are super resource intensive and they will eat through your VRAM. Two seconds of delay at 3840×2610@60fps will chew up 4GB of VRAM like it’s nothing. And that’s per instance of the plugin! If you try to use more delay than your computer can handle, Resolume will start swapping VRAM with regular RAM and your fps will drop like the bodies on the floor in that one Disturbed song. So keep an eye on your hardware stats and don’t let your VRAM go in the red.

I’m going to say this again, because I don’t think you heard me. If you try to use more delay than your computer can handle, your fps will drop hard! The maximum delay values are set for high end GPUs with 12GB VRAM or more. Don’t drop a Delayer in a machine with a mid range GPU from 3 years ago, max out the delay and then come crying to me that performance is so bad. You’ve been warned and this paragraph will be exhibit A.

You can choose to set the delay in Frames, Seconds or Beats. Frames is the most accurate, as the value will always be fixed. Seconds is probably the most easy to work with, but keep in mind that the number of frames that have to be stored in memory will change when the framerate changes. This goes double for Beats, where the number of actual frames stored is dependent on both the fps and the current BPM.

The Delay slider is intended for live control. It’s programmed to be more efficient than setting the max delay directly, so by all means go ham on it.

Mask

Mask is a blend mode that weirdly doesn’t come natively with Resolume. It’s very useful for the Outliner effect, because it let’s you use the outlines as a mask. The effect takes the luminance values of the the wet texture and applies them as as a mask to reveal the dry texture. It’s essentially the same as 50% multiply except it also hides the dry texture where the alpha of the wet texture is 0.

For ease of use, you can also Invert the mask.

Keep in mind, blends on effects need their opacity set to 50% to have their desired effect.

Random

I love random number generation and so of course there is a Random plugin in the Chaser suite. Random does what it says on the tin, it makes a random selection of slices and chases those. You can tweak the selection using the following parameters:

View is helpful when you want to narrow down the set of slices it picks from. By default, it’s set to All, which means it will randomly select from all the slices in the currently active Advanced Output preset. By adding more Views in the app, you can create different sub selections to choose from.

Max Slices controls how many slices the random selection will consist of. Everything is still random, so setting this to 4 will give you between 1 and 4 randomly selected slices on each step. This value is limited to a maximum of 7, or half of the available slices, which ever happens to be lower. It’s dangerous to tell a computer to select more slices than there are. It would start creating slices itself and soon it will devour humanity in its hunger for more slices.

Similar to Bumper, Speed is used to control how fast the slices fade out and the next random selection is made. 

Scaling, Echoes, Sustain and Release all also work exactly the same as above.

Outliner

Outliner is a little different. Its main function is to create outlines around your slices. Outliner is available both as a Source and an Effect.

By default, it’s a very straightforward effect and it has only a few parameters.

First off, it has the same View parameter that Random has. You use it to either create outlines on All your slices, or narrow it down to a subset you created in the app.

You don’t need me to explain what Color is for.

Width sets the size of the stroke in pixels. This is pixel accurate and always stroked on the inside of the slice, even on complex polygon shapes. So you will never get bleed on neighboring slices, even if they are right next to each other.

Feather adds a fade from the edge inward, This is useful for quickly applying a little vignette or frame around a slice.

Now, once you hit the Animate toggle, a whole new world opens up. The Feather option disappears, but the outlines will change from being fully filled, to a nicely tapered off line. You also get a whole bunch of new parameters!

Animate the Phase parameter to let the line move around the slice.

Cranking up the Fan parameter will slightly offset each animation from the center outward. This creates a very nice fluid looking result with lots of slices.

Similarly, the Randomise parameter will offset each animation by a random amount, for some more organic looking animations.

Length controls how long the line is, while Count controls how the amount of lines per slice.

Slices to the right of the center will always animate clockwise, slices to the left of the center will animate counter clockwise and slices exactly in the center will be mirrored. You can reverse this direction by toggling Flip Direction. You can also reverse the direction for every other slice by toggling Odd/Even.

When used as an effect, Outliner also has a Show Original parameter. Toggle this to draw the outline over the original image. You could use this to for example stack multiple outlines with multiple colors on top of each other in a single clip.

Tiler

Tiler is great for creating animated pixel patterns inside your slices.

It’s designed to really be a Bob Ross type of creative tool. You fiddle around, causing happy accidents until you see something you like. It has a crazy amount of parameters to play with and with most of them being visual, it’s best to just see it in action in the video below.

Sampler

Sampler is all about using video to drive your chases. It samples the pixels underneath your slices and uses that information to change how each slice looks.

Similarly to Random and Outliner, there is a View parameter that lets you narrow down which slices get used for this instance of the effect.

Sample Mode controls how the pixels underneath the slice are sampled:

• Center just samples one pixel at the center of the slice. This gives nice high contrast results and is also fastest performance wise.
• Average samples at the center and at the four corners and then averages that. This is slightly slower to process but gives a more even result.
• Blend samples at the four corners and then blends between them. This gives a very smooth result and is great to create happy, colorful atmospheres.

Color Mode then determines how the sampled pixel data should be displayed:

• Color just uses the resulting color as is. It will display the slice in the sampled color.
• Luminance uses the brightness of the color instead. It will display the slice in a shade of white.

Wiper

Wiper is all about creating smooth looking wipes across your content. Simply select your Sequence, animate the Step parameter and away you go. On each step, Wiper will animate a gradient wipe over the slices in that step.

You can set the Scaling to Fill to fit the content into the slice before wiping it, or set it to Mask to keep the content as is before wiping.

Length makes the wipe longer or shorter.

By cranking up the Overlap, you can tell Wiper to start wiping the slices in the next step before the previous one is finished. This creates a smoother, more continuous looking result.

Loops controls how many times Wiper should loop through the sequence. By cranking up both the Overlap and the amount of Loops, you can create very organic looking animations very quickly. Note that on very high Loops and Overlap values, the loop might cut off abruptly at the end. If that happens, just lower the Loop count a little to get a perfect loop again.

Slices with a vertical aspect ratio will always bottom to top. Slices with a horizontal aspect ratio will wipe left to right when the slice is right of center and right to left when the slice is left of center. Slices exactly in the center will wipe mirrored. Note that this takes rotation into account, so a horizontal slice, rotated 90 degrees clockwise, will wipe top to bottom. Hit Flip Direction to have all slices go the other way, or Odd/Even to flip the direction on every other step. Finally, Swap Directions can be used to wipe vertically on horizontal slices and horizontally on vertical ones.

Chaser/Bumper Blend

Besides the regular Chaser and Bumper effects, these plugins also come as a blend mode.

In the screenshot above, you see the built-in Colorize effect, with its Blend Mode changed from Alpha to Chaser. This reveals the regular Chaser parameters and you can choose a Sequence and animate a Step like in the regular version. Similarly, setting the Blend Mode to Bumper will reveal the Bumper parameters.

The only difference is that instead of chasing or bumping the opacity of the content, you now chase or bump the result of the applied effect. On each step, you will see the content turn red, before fading out back to the original image without the effect applied.

Of course, this can be used with any effect you like, making it super easy to add more subtle dynamics to your stage.

Note that Resolume is a little weird in how it works with blends, so you will need to set the effect Opacity to 50% to get the best result.