Transition / live performance workflow?

[drakmor]

Hi all,

Just stumbled across Veejay in my search to find a usable piece of VJ software for live performance. I'm mostly down to either Veejay or Lives now, but I'm a little confused about how to smoothly transition between clips in Veejay. Is there any documentation about this or a list of tutorials somewhere I could take a look at?

I'm particularly confused by the idea of the FX chain being clip specific - in Lives, the effects are simply applied to whatever the main clip on the screen is, and I'm trying to replicate that functionality. 

As far as transitions go, I've gotten as far as applying a mixing effect and hitting the transition button with the "switch clips after transition" button, but I was wondering if there was a way to slow down the transition a bit (or even do it manually - when I tried dragging the bar myself with the switch clips button pressed I got a weird flickering between a bunch of samples effect), and I'm not at all clear on what all of the buttons immediately to the left of the transition bar do.

My last questions for now (I'm sure I'll think of more) are about the MIDI functionaliy. I couldn't figure out a way to toggle the state of an effect, so I needed to use two buttons per effect - one for on and one for off. Is this avoidable? Also, when I tried using the mapped midi buttons, they work, but I noticed that the reloaded gui doesn't update until I actually click on the part that was changed by the midi input. I'm assuming this is because the midi commands are getting sent directly to the server, but I was wondering if there was some way to get the reloaded client to automatically update as midi inputs change things on the server. 

Thanks!