VJing — Visuals & Guide for Live Video Performance

VJing explained: what a VJ does and what you need to start

VJing is the live performance of visuals. A VJ selects, layers and mixes video in real time so that what the room sees moves with what the room hears. The word is short for video jockey, and the parallel with a disc jockey is exact: a DJ works with sound, a VJ works with image, and both are performing live rather than playing back a finished film.

The difference people notice first is location. The DJ is on stage. The VJ is at front of house — the technical booth at the back of the venue with a clear view of the stage, sitting alongside the lighting operator. That position exists for a reason: you cannot mix visuals you cannot see land.

VJ, video operator, lighting operator — who does what

These three roles sit next to each other and get confused constantly, including by people booking them.

The lighting operator works with light fixtures from a large hardware console. Almost everything is physical: faders, encoders, a patch of real lamps in the rig.

The VJ works with image, and the work is almost entirely software-based. The output goes to LED panels or to a projector, and the instrument is a laptop running VJ software with a controller attached.

The video operator does something that looks identical from the audience but is not. A video operator’s job is to put the right visual on the screen at the right moment — the sponsor logo during the sponsor’s slot, the artist’s IMAG feed during the solo, the correct cue on the correct beat of a timecoded show. That is the role at corporate events and on most large tours. A VJ has the freedom to combine content on the spot, responding to the room and to what the DJ is doing right now.

Neither is superior. They are different jobs with different risks. A video operator who improvises has made a mistake. A VJ who only plays the running order is a video operator with a more expensive laptop. Know which one you have been hired to be before you arrive.

What you actually need to start VJing

Four things. In this order, because the order matters more than people expect.

1. Content

Content comes first because everything downstream is just a way of playing it. You can own the best software in existence and have nothing to show.

There are five kinds of material a VJ works with:

• Static images — a logo, a photograph, a render, a typographic plate. JPEG, PNG, GIF. Put live effects on a still and it becomes motion, and the project stays extremely light.
• Video — anything shot with a camera, from a phone clip to film.
• CGI — animation rendered out of 3D and motion software such as Cinema 4D, Houdini, After Effects or Unreal Engine.
• VJ loops — the format the whole discipline runs on. A VJ loop is composed so that its last frame returns cleanly to its first, which gives it an artificial but perfect infinite life. Set it to loop and it plays until you stop it, with no visible seam.
• Generative visuals — patches, scripts and plugins rather than files. They contain instructions instead of pixels, so file sizes are tiny and parameters such as speed, density and colour stay editable while you perform.

Most working VJs use a mixture, with loops as the backbone because they are reliable, and generative layers on top because they are responsive. Everything on this page belongs to the fourth category: pre-rendered, seamless, and encoded to play under load.

2. Software

The instrument. The three names you will hear most are Resolume Arena, MadMapper and TouchDesigner, and they suit different temperaments.

Resolume is the standard for club and festival performance: fast to learn, built around a performance workflow, with by far the largest user base and the most learning material. MadMapper is built for surfaces and installations, and has moved into laser control as well. TouchDesigner is a node-based environment for people who want to build the instrument rather than play a ready-made one.

There is a rough truth in the community that Resolume VJs are the ones dancing behind the panel and TouchDesigner VJs are the ones sitting very still while the crowd loses its mind. Both descriptions are affectionate and both are accurate.

If you are choosing, we maintain a rating of the best VJ software and a much longer mega list of VJ software and tools including the free and open-source options.

3. Hardware

A laptop with a dedicated GPU, enough RAM to hold your set, and — this is the part people skip — fast storage. Live visuals are large files being read continuously, and a single high-resolution layer can saturate a slow drive on its own. NVMe, not a spinning disk and not a network share.

A MIDI controller is not strictly required and becomes essential the moment you play a real show. Reaching for a trackpad in the dark while a drop is landing is not performing.

4. Output, and the boring part that decides everything

You will send video to a projector or to LED panels. Two decisions get made here and both are usually made badly.

The first is resolution, which should be chosen from the surface rather than from ambition. A club screen and a 40-metre facade want very different numbers, and buying more pixels than the surface can show is money spent on file size. We have written the whole argument out in the most commonly used resolutions in VJing.

The second is codec, and it is the single most common cause of a set that stutters. Delivery formats such as H.264 are designed to make files small; they collapse when you ask for eight simultaneous layers. Playback codecs such as HAP, DXV and NotchLC are designed to make frames cheap for the graphics card. Our guide to the video codecs every VJ needs covers what to install, what to delete, and the one encoding setting that fixes most stutter.

Where VJs actually work

Clubs are where most people start and they are not where most of the money is. Live visuals are used at concerts and tours, music festivals, corporate events and product launches, theatre and opera, brand activations, art installations and museum spaces, weddings and private events, and increasingly on streams.

The skill transfers across all of them. The content does not, entirely — a corporate keynote and a techno night want opposite things — but the craft of reading a room and cutting on time is the same everywhere. If you want the numbers on what these bookings pay, we surveyed our own audience and published the results in how much you can earn creating VJ shows.