Resolume Avenue or Arena is a good place to start. It’s meant for vjs, but I’ve done everything from business videos to pub quizes with it. It’s very versatile and has a huge amount of fx built in.
Notch and touch designer (as @goldfarb pointed out) are incredibly deep and come with a learning curve if you’re not used to node based systems- but extremely rewarding. Touch designer aims at interactive installations too and goes way beyond mere screen related stuff (you can control led’s and even simple robotics. It has midi implementation too) - like anything; plenty of tutorials on the tube but might be a bit overkill for your goals (I guess)
Yeah my only complaint with it is the naming conventions seem pretty foriegn to me beyond the 3d rendering/textures which are pretty standard. I feel like 90% of the battle is finding all the different modulation and ways to attenuate data into something useful. If things were named in a more in line with synths it would be way easier to parse the stuff without tutorials.
Just throwing this in here as an aside, probably not what OP is looking for, but Reaper also has a few basic video filters and interesting effects builtin (as well as an API to create your own), for anyone that hasn’t noticed / looked into it, or is browsing for a cheap editing solution.
Other than that I have used Processing a bit to create filters and overlays / animations. Blender at some point. I would really love to go further down that road, but like with all these rabbit holes, it’s such a big time investment.
Don’t listen to the people about TouchDesigner. Everybody who has a normal IQ shouldn’t bother (or dedicate his life to this application for a long time).
My advice:
Resolume Avenue (or MadMapper < now with Laser control! or VDMX)
Camera to make pics / videos
Laptop / PC with a recent GPU (M1 Apple work very very good)
It’s an easy start to get lost in – with instant success.
It’s all about the right codecs as well – so make sure to use the codecs the VJ software advices (they mostly have GPU support and thus render super quick).
but first of all, anything visual u can create for screen, can be screened, projected and mapped to anything…later on…
some goes for interaction with sound…
so if ther’s any chance ur into ableton, max/msp/for live ucan call urself lucky, since there is a huuge variety of presets for all kinds of visual games to choose and use to ur liking to come with heaps of lucky dips and happy accidents straight forward right next to the sonic stuff ur doing…
cause all this is such a complex field of it’s own, another totallly related, but still very different job to fulfill, that u really gotto ask urself…am i into sonics or visuals…takes lot’s of efforts to do both…
so max/cycling74, living right next to ur daw grid is the most shortcut i can think of…
while all people i know, that come with their dedicated light and visual show content to comfort their gigs, have a dedicated person or even team to do all this…
So taking it all in to account, it looks like Resolume Avenue would be best suited to me as a total beginner and the download is free, other than you willl have the Resolume logo imprinted on the video and any audio will be a ‘robot’ voice according to the site? Not fussed about the latter for now as I only want to produce videos say at a certain BPM so they don’t need to be synced to the music.
…if ur alone to conquer it, abletons maxforlive is made for u…
that part has it’s own community, also the visual aspects of it and u’d be surprised what some of their software modules can do with any visual live feed, even ur laptop cam, in realtime, always according ur music…
and stop all thinking about producing vids upfront according to certain bpm right there…
is Max4Live really good? I found the UI to be maximal unusable. Editing finished patches was the most horrible things I’ve tried. It’s a UI/UX disaster and I look up to people who can work with it.
İ love manni dee yeah probably resolume touch designer is a good option. For ableton users i would recomend zwobot and ebosuite , making visuals with ableton workflow is amazing
Max for Live has a lot of video options - I also muck around with this. If you don’t want to roll your own, you could try the Zwobot suite of patches. I’ve almost bought this several times now, and probably will before the year is out.