For the past few weeks I’ve been playing with Quartz Composer live at Plug ‘n Play on Thursday nights at the Kent St Café 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:

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