ArKaos VJ: Choosing the Ultimate Computer

ArKaos VJ allows you to work with many layers and effects together, but the smoothness and the quality of your show depends on the equipment you use. Here are some important things to consider when purchasing or upgrading a machine for use with VJ.

Processors and Memory:

The most important thing for ArKaos VJ is the combination of your motherboard, main processor, and RAM. The faster the RAM, the more reactive your layer triggering will be. If you choose 400MHz memory, your layers will be triggered very quickly.

For ArKaos VJ, the cache memory of the main processor may even be more important than the processor speed. ArKaos VJ also uses processor optimizations like MMX and SSE2, so it is important to use a processor that handles these instruction extensions sets.

Finally, a dual-processor system (or a processor with Hyper-Threading technology that behaves like a dual processor) will greatly enhance the system’s performance by allowing QuickTime to run on a single processor and ArKaos VJ to run on the other one.

Hard drive:

Your videos must be present on your hard drive in order to be triggered quickly and played smoothly (playing videos directly from a CD/DVD ROM is extremely inefficient), so it is important to choose fast hard-drives. This is especially true if you want to trigger multiple high-resolution videos together.

We recommend choosing a Serial ATA drive, which is now supported by the latest motherboards. It would be optimal to use two SATA drives together in RAID “high performance” mode (RAID 1), so the two disks are used to play the video.

Graphics Card:

In order to work in dual-monitor mode, you need to choose a graphics card that has two monitor outputs. We recommend the NVIDIA GeForceFX or ATI Radeon series graphics cards. If you plan to use a laptop, be sure to verify that your external output is able to display a different signal than the internal one.

For additional information on configuring dual screen usage, please visit http://m-pulse.m-audio.com/spec/Arkaos_VJ_101.php.

Video Inputs:

We recommend using a dedicated PCI acquisition board instead of an external USB/FireWire device. Such devices use compressed video streams, which ultimately yield less smooth results. Please note that a large video memory size is not crucial for ArKaos VJ 3.0; 16 MB is sufficient.

For more information about using video input devices with VJ, please visit http://m-pulse.m-audio.com/articles/december2003/streaming_ARKaos.php.

Operating System:

On a PC, we recommend using Windows XP rather than Windows 2000, because XP natively supports the dual-monitor feature.

On a Mac, we recommend using OS X.

If you would like additional information on the above topics, please reference the following articles:

- Optimizing Videos for ArKaos VJ

- Increasing the Performance Speed of ArKaos VJ

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