Vuo

In this post, recent updates about the Vuo community: Vuo Pro discounts in Latin America, Africa, Turkey, and Russia An interview with artist Joëlle Snaith on her visual soundscapes What it's like to be an intern with Team Vuo New features in Vuo 2.2 and 2.3

If you've been enjoying the free version of Vuo but are craving those Pro features, now is an excellent time to buy Vuo Pro. Through the end of July, instead of the regular price of $299 USD, Vuo Pro is just $179 USD.

With Vuo 2.1, you can now stream video over the internet. We've given Vuo Community Edition the ability to send RTMP video and audio (so you can stream to services like YouTube, Facebook Live, or Twitch). In Vuo Pro, we've added new nodes to send ... [More] and receive NewTek NDI® video streams. With the increased prominence of live streaming these days, we feel these new features pair well with Vuo’s extensive graphic abilities, so you can imagine, and then broadcast, one-of-a-kind visuals. Read on for the release highlights, using Vuo to enhance broadcast streaming, and a Community Spotlight on visions of deep space. [Less]

Many of you have been asking us: "Is it soup yet?" When soup is cooking, the aroma fills the room and maybe you can even get a taste from the pot. But when it’s ready, you can sit down and enjoy the meal with your friends and family. So, to all the Vuo community, we are proud to announce: "It’s soup. Dig in!"

Vuo 2.0 includes many new features and a new visual design. This beta is available to everyone who has a current Vuo license, and those who have an expired Vuo license. Community members with current Pro licenses will be able to access the Vuo Pro ... [More] 2.0 beta. With the upcoming release of Vuo 2.0, the new Vuo Community Edition will be free for personal use and small organizations, and be fully open source. Vuo 2.0 supports macOS 10.10 and up. [Less]

Vuo 2.0 includes many new features and a new visual design. This beta is available to everyone who has a current Vuo license, and those who have an expired Vuo license. Community members with current Pro licenses will be able to access the Vuo Pro ... [More] 2.0 beta. With the upcoming release of Vuo 2.0, the new Vuo Community Edition will be free for personal use and small organizations, and be fully open source. Vuo 2.0 supports macOS 10.10 and up. [Less]

Hello everyone! We are continuing to make progress on Vuo 2.0. We wanted to share the latest on when you'll be able to try it yourself. In addition, we want to share some news on new nodes and some node modifications that expand what you can do ... [More] with Vuo 2.0. Do check out our new Pro feature, Find Faces in Image. To remind you of how to best take advantage of Vuo 2.0's new pricing, we've included a pricing flowchart. [Less]

Hello everyone! We are continuing to make progress on Vuo 2.0. We wanted to share the latest on when you'll be able to try it yourself. In addition, we want to share some news on new nodes and some node modifications that expand what you can do ... [More] with Vuo 2.0. Do check out our new Pro feature, Find Faces in Image. To remind you of how to best take advantage of Vuo 2.0's new pricing, we've included a pricing flowchart. Vuo 2.0 beta release date Right now our best estimate for our Vuo 2.0 beta release date is this June or July. As Jaymie mentioned in a previous post: "Before we release the final version of Vuo 2.0 to the world, we're going to release a beta version to the Vuo community. This will give you a chance to try out the new features, and will give us a chance to fix any major problems that you discover before the final release. Who can be a beta tester? Anyone who's ever bought Vuo… Whether you're a Vuo virtuoso or just getting started, we heartily invite you to try the Vuo 2.0 beta when it's released. We'd appreciate feedback from all perspectives." New and improved nodes New web page node Have you ever thought about how a webpage and Vuo could interact? We've added a Make Image from Web Page node so you can try it out. With this node you will be able to view an image of a webpage in Vuo, and interact with it using your mouse. What is perhaps even more useful is that now you can also create your own HTML control panel to control a Vuo composition, as the following video shows. New Speak node Longing to hear Vuo articulate text? With Vuo's Speak node, you can have text spoken aloud by different macOS System Voices. Want to channel HAL 9000's, "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave," anyone? New UI nodes Seeking easier ways to interact with your composition? We've added three UI widgets, Make Toggle Button, Make Action Button, and Make Slider, to support the community's feature request for a user interface node set. As shown through the node screenshots and image below, you can extensively customize these UI nodes by using the Make Action Button Theme (Rounded), Make Slider Button Theme (Rounded) and Make Toggle Button Theme (Rounded). We also have created a Make Material Theme node based on Material Design. The colors are optimized for a white background, and have input ports for color, color variant, and emphasis. New image filter nodes Vuo has over 30 nodes to modify images in different ways. Vuo 2.0 will include two more image effects, Dilate Image and Add Film Grain nodes. Better handling of text Text layers will now scale with the window size, as the community requested. Make Text Layer adds input ports to rotate the text, gives you an option to set the wrap width, and adds an opacity port. You can additionally stretch or expand the text, changing the horizontal and vertical scale by transforming the layer. More list nodes We've expanded what you can do with lists. You will be able to remove duplicates from a list, sort a list, create an OSC message from a list, and get a list of values from an OSC message. Better rendering of semi-transparent objects We changed the algorithm for rendering semi-transparent objects by adding support for depth-sorting. While it won't cover all cases, it will fix some of the problems identified by our community, and is partial implementation of a feature request for improving the rendering of transparent objects. New face detection node (Pro) If you have Vuo Pro, you will be able to use Find Faces in Image to detect faces in an image, a community feature request. Best deals for Vuo 2.0 If you want access to all the Pro features, including Find Faces in Image, now might be a good time to upgrade. If you're thinking about buying Vuo Pro, you might want to do so before the 2.0 release, when the price will go up to $299. Instead, you can buy Vuo Pro 1.2.8 now for $149, get a free upgrade to Vuo Pro 2.0, and get early access to Vuo Pro 2.0 as a beta tester. In case you missed our previous post, here's a summary of the new pricing for Vuo 2.0: Our educational discount will be going up to 80%. So if you're a student or teacher, you'll be able to buy Vuo Pro 2.0 for under $60. One of our goals with the new pricing is to help the Vuo community grow in numbers and diversity. If you know someone who might be able to use Vuo in their work, please tell them about it or send them to the Quick Start Tutorial. We'll continue to update you periodically with any changes to our beta release date. — Jean Marie Team Vuo [Less]

We've renovated Vuo's user interface for the upcoming 2.0 release. Here's a preview of what's changed, including a first glimpse of Vuo 2.0 in action in our new Quick Start tutorial. You'll be able to take Vuo 2.0 for a test drive in a few months. ... [More] More on that at end of this post. New Quick Start tutorial Since Vuo Community Edition 2.0 will be free for personal use and small organizations, we're hopeful that a lot more people will try it. To help beginners build their Vuo skills — and make sure we provide up-to-date information to everyone — we're revamping our video tutorials. Here's our new Quick Start tutorial that teaches the basics of Vuo in under 3 minutes. Simplified interaction Confusion: This is the enemy. We do not wish to be confused, befuddled, and frustrated by our tools. The argument against complexity is due to the common misunderstanding that complexity leads to confusion. No, it doesn't have to. This is the role of good design: to make complex things simple to understand, easy to use, and delightful. — Don Norman Projecting 360° video inside an inflatable dome… mapping virtual 3D objects onto LED strips… using raindrops to trigger light and sound — these are the kinds of complex tasks that we hope to make simple to understand through Vuo. Since the very first beta release back in 2013, you, the community, have taught us which parts of Vuo succeed in simplifying your work and which parts are confusing. In response, we're continually working to make Vuo easier to use. Here are some of the simplifications you can look forward to in Vuo 2.0. Time flows left to right In the Quick Start tutorial, you might have noticed that we controlled the timing of the animation using a Fire on Display Refresh node instead of the Render Image to Window node's Requested Frame port (which no longer exists). This change eliminates those long cables stretching right-to-left across your composition from Requested Frame ports to Time ports. Along with changes to the way cables are drawn (discussed later in this post), this will make it easier to follow the cables in your composition. Refresh ports are gone Melissa (mkegan) of Team Vuo was teaching her brother how to use Vuo. He wanted to play a movie, so he tried this: From experiences like this, we found out that the input port at the top of every node, called the refresh port, was confusing. So in Vuo 2.0 we've gotten rid of it. At the same time, we've added a little time-saver. In Vuo 2.0, you can connect an event cable to the first input port of a node by dropping it onto the node's title bar. Port popovers show images Those little views that show live data and events when you click on a port, called port popovers, have proved to be one of Vuo's most helpful features. In Vuo 2.0, we've made them even more helpful for image ports by showing a preview of the image. By the way, as of Vuo 2.0, port popovers work inside of subcompositions, too. Published inputs emit only needed events A lot of people have been confused about how events flow into subcompositions. Through discussion with Philip, Teo, and others, we learned how to make this more intuitive. In Vuo 2.0, when an event hits a subcomposition node, it will only enter the subcomposition through the input ports that it hit (not all input ports as it did before). Vuo compositions running inside of VJ apps, FFGL plugins, and Final Cut Pro X plugins will behave similarly. Published inputs will only emit events when their data has changed (not on every frame). So your compositions will run more efficiently by default, without your having to add Allow Changes nodes. Backward compatibility How will these changes affect the compositions you already have? See our guide on updating compositions from Vuo 1.x to Vuo 2.0. TL;DR: If your composition contains community nodes, subcompositions, or published ports, you may need to make some changes. Otherwise, your composition will run the same as before (except 3D lighting will look a little different). When you create compositions in Vuo 2.0, they probably won't work in earlier versions of Vuo, because of all the new nodes. Simplified appearance How comfortable it is to interact with an app depends on how it looks. Does the design succeed in making complex things simple to understand? With advice and even mockups from the community, we've continually worked to remove clutter from Vuo's user interface. As we test Vuo 2.0, there are some changes that we've quickly grown accustomed to, that we miss when we go back to Vuo 1.2.8. One such change is the new cable paths. Vuo 2.0 draws cables using an algorithm inspired by suggestions from Bodysoulspirit, mnstri, Philip, and vade. Long cables are straight instead of curved. This makes it easier to see which nodes are connected to which. Vuo 2.0 is not the first time or the last time that we'll be updating Vuo's appearance, but it's by far the most redesigning we've done in any single release to date. New logo In harmony with the redesigned appearance, Vuo 2.0 has a redesigned app icon and logo. A while back, Bodysoulspirit started a community discussion about a new logo for the next version of Vuo. He must have been on the same wavelength as Team Vuo, because we had just started discussing the same thing amongst ourselves. In the community discussion, Bodysoulspirit, DDAANNYYBBOOYY, Azy, and GeorgeToledo suggested a mélange of interesting designs. Thank you so much! Along the way, we learned a lot about what folks in the community like and dislike about logo designs. With that knowledge in hand, we hired a design firm local to us, Red Tail Design Co. We showed them some of the community's designs, explained that there were many aspects we liked but we hadn't yet found "the one", and asked them to propose some designs of their own. Over a span of several weeks, Red Tail Design worked with us to come up with a distinctive concept and refine it into a finished design. We ended up with a logo that we're happy with, and we hope you are, too. Early access to Vuo 2.0 Before we release the final version of Vuo 2.0 to the world, we're going to release a beta version to the Vuo community. This will give you a chance to try out the new features, and will give us a chance to fix any major problems that you discover before the final release. Who can be a beta tester? Anyone who's ever bought Vuo. When can you start beta testing? We estimate that we'll release the Vuo 2.0 beta sometime between April and June. Whether you're a Vuo virtuoso or just getting started, we heartily invite you to try the Vuo 2.0 beta when it's released. We'd appreciate feedback from all perspectives. We hope this post will give you a head start in getting accustomed to the new look and behavior of Vuo 2.0. If you know anyone who might be able to use Vuo 2.0 in their work, you can give them a head start, too, by sending them the Quick Start tutorial or our tutorials on creating Final Cut Pro X plugins and FFGL plugins. — Jaymie Team Vuo [Less]

We've renovated Vuo's user interface for the upcoming 2.0 release. Here's a preview of what's changed, including a first glimpse of Vuo 2.0 in action in our new Quick Start tutorial.