dpwolf/blog

Click the poster movies above to load the real ones. The second one will take a little while to load (3.9Mb)

Alternatively (recommended) download the two files, ControlTOBE.mov (Controller) and TOBE.mov (Player) and open them both in Quicktime Player.

Ok, this is a half finished draft of a basic Quicktime vision mixer. Like the inter-movie text communication movies I posted earlier , this project comes in two parts: one movie to control another. I actually created the text sender movies to troubleshoot when I was making this movie.

The ‘player’ movie contains three video tracks. The ‘controller’ movie features a number of clickable sprites which tell the ‘player’ movie what to do. By clicking on the green or red buttons on the left hand side of the ‘controller’ the tracks in the ‘player’ movie may be enabled or disabled. In the middle of the ‘controller’ movie there are two gradients with a percentage number, these control the opacity of each of the two ‘upper’ video tracks. By clicking on the gradients at various different places along the horizontal the numbers should change and the tracks should fade in or out. On the far right of the ‘controller’ movie is the ‘invert’ button. This inverts the top video track so that white is black and black is white etc.. The other button at the bottom of the ‘controller’ is the ‘add’ button. It is the latest addition and it also controls the top movie (I’ll move it up top in the next version). Rather than simply inverting the video track, the ‘add’ button produces an additive effect (like a Photoshop layer) which changes depending on the presence or absence of the underlying two video tracks.

This draft was designed as an experiment in building a VJ instrument in Quicktime with Livestage Pro for a recent Segmentation Fault gig I was organising. The ‘player’ movie is designed to automatically go to full screen on the video output of my laptop while the ‘controller’ sits on my screen out of sight. I built a more complicated version with about 20 different video tracks for the gig but unfortunately most of the effects such as fading in and out and layering decided not to work on the night. I think I’ve worked out the problem so I’ll post a new version soon.

The buttons usually take a couple of clicks to get going but they should work after that.