MixVibes have been steadily beavering away at honing and developing rekordbox for Pioneer, but most certainly haven’t neglected their own range either. And if the above image is anything to go by, it looks like MixVibes will be inject their Cross DJ package with some video love.
Cross 2 has become a really solid and fully featured product, with the rekordbox development work really paying dividends for Cross. But it looks like the work MixVibes have done with the very wonderful VFX is about to make its way into the DJ range too. Obviously being a teaser, it’s hard to make anything out, but with some Photoshop jiggery pokery, (I tried asking Siri to zoom in and enhance like they do on the telly but was met with the usual failure), I could make out that the audio and video elements sit side by side in the deck area, making life easier for those who use waveforms. Beyond that, much like the teaser image. I’m in the dark.
Opinion
MixVibes VFX is an extremely capable video package. The big problem is that it’s Windows only. But the controller that is bundled is a simple OEM model, thus the software can easily be mapped to just about any other controller out there. So if they can successfully add video with the full VFX feature set into MixVibes Cross, then the video scene just got very interesting indeed.
Virtual DJ has done video for ever, but at a pretty basic level. Serato has the Serato Video plugin which is quite comprehensive and cross platform, whereas MixEmergency is better still but Mac only. And as for Traktor… well given that their biggest competitors will have solid video offerings, perhaps we’ll see the long rumoured (they advertised for video specialists a couple of years back) video for Traktor will appear. Video isn’t anything new to MixVibes either – the old DVS Pro version could handle video, albeit in a pretty basic manner.
This seems to be a distillation of their hard work with VFX and the maturing of their original DVS Pro features, and looks to add some very useful features to Cross. I was always a hard critic of their approach of putting as much as possible into the MixVibes application at the expense of quality and usability. But now their steady development practice is really working. And given their video experience, this could be a landmark moment for MixVibes, Cross and the scene too. Fingers crossed.