For the past few weeks I’ve been playing with Quartz Composer live at Plug ‘n Play on Thursday nights at the Kent St Cafι on Smith St in Collingwood (Melbourne). It’s a great place to experiment in a comfortable environment with a projector and sound system and the only place I can imagine that gives you free drinks for sitting in the corner programming!
Last Thursday I attempted to use my QuickTime vj application Vidget 3.5 (I’m actually up to version 3.6 but haven’t got around posting it) to mix Quartz compositions saved as .mov files. This produced some interesting (unstable) results. The way the vidget works is to layer up to three Quicktime movies (movies in a movie) over the top of each other with different transparency/opacity graphics modes - like video Photoshop layers which are rendered in real time by Quicktime. With the standard ‘Dither Copy’ mode my compositions played reasonably well but whenever I switched to some other modes the video flickered very fast and bright and whenever I resized the window to go to full screen Quicktime unexpectedly quit.
Since I couldn’t use the vidget I decided to see what happened when I dropped Quartz compositions saved as .mov files into the composition workspace of a new file, to my surprise rather than appearing as ‘image with movie’ nodes (as QuickTime movies usually do), they were added as ‘macro patches’ meaning I could double click and manipulate their inner workings, excellent!
Here’s an image of my original composition space with the new macro patch highlighted:
Double clicking on the macro patch reveals the composition within:
Technorati Tags: Quartz Composer
I’ve been having a good play with Quartz Composer over the last couple of weeks. It is very exciting and a bit scary at this late stage of my MA research: “Does it make what I’ve been doing for the past two years redundant?”; “Should I drop the whole interactive QuickTime thing and start from scratch in this new environment?”; “Should I ignore it for now and continue with QT because it is cross platform and more accessible?”.
In many ways it lets me do what I have been doing, experimenting with, and wanting to do (real time interactive online video) much more quickly and with exciting new visual results. In some ways it makes basic QT redundant but it is quite a different beast.
QuickTime excels on the network. Child movies can be sourced from anywhere, XML and QTlists while a pain to set up sometimes are very powerful and I’ve only really scratched the surface of their potential when combined with server side scripting such as php. Quartz Composer is much more at home on the desktop. It can import still image files from a URL but not movies. It can read RSS very easily, but is designed for human readable text and requires custom scripting to deal with generic XML files and attributes. I have had some success getting QC to load movies from the network via a local QuickTime link file pointing to a URL, but the targeting it is local, relative to the QC composition. It seems this link is lost if the composition is exported to a .mov file.
Here is a quick example (requires Mac OS 10.4). Apologies for the cheesy kaleidoscope imagery 
once downloaded and unzipped, the .qtz file should play in Quartz Composer, importing link.mov which points to a video file on my server. The zip file is about 4k.
The cool thing is, in many ways this (Quartz Composer), builds upon what I have been doing in QuickTime and is mostly playable by both the QT player and plugin. While the linking to movie files online is problematic at this point, surprisingly live video and audio inputs are supported even in the QuickTime browser plugin! Here is an example which takes a live feed from a FireWire camera, layers it over itself on 3 differently coloured layers (red green and blue) and scales in real time based upon audio input from the computer’s built in microphone. Link to livergb.mov. This has been tested in Safari with a Sony HandyCam and my PowerBook’s built in microphone. Here’s the source .qtz file. While live video input into a movie playing in a browser is pretty exciting, unfortunately more simple things like keyboard and mouse input are missing.
Stay tuned for more examples as I play more…
For me, the coolest new feature of Mac OS 10.4 “Tiger” is an application called Quartz Composer included with ‘Developers Tools’. It allows the user/developer to create patches for the real time generation and manipulation of images using the new Core Image engine via a visual patch based interface.
Quartz Composer shares much of its interface style and function with its predecessor PixelShox, an OpenGL based real time video application a mate of mine Khalid has been using for vj work for a while now. While it is no longer being actively developed (its developer has taken a full time position in the computer graphics field *cough* at apple *cough*), it’s worth a look if you have a Mac and have not moved to 10.4 yet.
Like PixelShox, Quartz Composer has a wide array of live inputs such as mouse and keyboard tracking, MIDI, audio and video inputs. One new input featured in Quartz Composer which has caught my eye is RSS processing using the new Safari RSS engine. While a more generic XML parser would have been preferable I’m sure I can have a lot of fun with RSS alone
Quartz compositions may be incorporated in ‘real’ programs with Cocoa bindings and interfaces built with the ‘inteface builder’ application, used as screen savers (one of the default screen savers included with 10.4 displays the current Apple News RSS feed in an ‘eye candy’ 3d flythrough) and, drumroll…. played in QuickTime Player in 10.4!
QuartzComps has popped up as a blog for sharing and discussing Quartz Composer patches, as has the Apple Quartzcomposer-dev Info Page mail list (see the Mailing List Archives too).
For more info on Core Image, Core Video and Quicktime 7 see this page of ArsTechnica’s excellent and in-depth review of 10.4 - Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger : Page 16
If all goes well this will be my first post in this new blog…
