Thank you to Stephen Gilmour who has put together this guide for playing beat-driven visuals such as the VDJ Toolkit Vol.4 in the Rekordbox DJ software and synchronising them to the music that you are playing.
Please note that I don’t use Rekordbox myself, so can’t offer any support beyond this guide – I would suggest asking Rekordbox support or other users of the software if you need any further help.
IMPORTANT: You must first upgrade to ‘Rekordbox Video’ if you only have the DJ licence.
1. Enable video in rekordbox:
Click the gear icon to access the Preferences window here:
Under the Controller heading go down to Auto Cue and change Deck 1 to “Disable”.
Now go down to the Continuous Playing and check the option “Automatically load tracks in a list and have them play continuously one after another”.
Under the Video heading check the box for Enable video function. A Video option will now appear on the left hand side browser of your Rekordbox display (see below). Now you have the option to create video playlists the same way you would with music playlists.
2. Create a video playlist
Right-click “Video Playlists” and create a new playlist.
Drag and drop your beat driven video files into the new playlist.
These videos can be rearranged into any order you like, please note that this will become the running order of your videos so spend some time to create the order as you want.
3. Enable video preview
You must now enable video preview by clicking the video option at the top of the screen:
This will give you the video preview and main screen panel below:
This is where you can see what is being displayed on the output screen. The left screen is the preview for deck 1 video, the right is the preview for deck 2.
The screen in the middle shows what is being output to your main screen.
4. Enable beat sync
The next step is to turn on beat sync for deck 1, this will make sure that the videos always sync with the music being played.
Click the button indicated below to turn beat sync on for deck 1:
5. Select a 4-deck view
Now we need to turn on one of the 4 deck views – this can be done by clicking this drop down menu:
6. Start playing videos
Click video on the right hand side browser and select the video at the top of your video playlist:
If you now hold shift and press the left arrow on your keyboard it will load the video into deck 1.
Use decks 3 and 4 to play your music (Rekordbox compatible controllers can be configured to load music to deck 3 and 4 by default).
Click play on deck 1 using Rekordbox on your PC or Mac to start playing video.
Make sure that the crossfader is set to the left and that “AV Sync” is turned off:
Turn down the “Trim” for deck 1 (see image below) this will prevent the drum beats on the video clips from being heard, but will still allow the video to be sync’d to the music.
When you load and play music using deck 3 and 4 the video on deck 1 should auto sync to match the beat of the track currently playing.
A good tip is to turn off “Eject/Load Lock”
This option allows you to load video into deck 1 at any time but be careful as it also means you could load a song into a deck which is currently playing!
Keep an eye on the video playlist – when it reaches the end you will need to restart it by loading the video at the top of your playlist again.
playlist to repeat.