Bikelights: a Quartz vidget

One of the coolest things I’ve discovered about Quartz Composer lately is the fact that you can use it (in combination with Xcode) create stand alone applications with custom interfaces all without having to know any ‘proper’ programming. So, here’s one of my first experiments….

This vidget is a simplified version of a larger Quartz Composer patch I have been using to perform with recently. It allows the user to import a number of Quicktime files or still images and apply a number of effects to them.

On the left hand side of the window are five text fields which store the local path to each movie file. To add your own clips, simply click in the field and then drag the movie’s icon from the finder into the field and press enter.

Just to the right of these text fields is a selection slider, which is used to select which source clip is to be effected. The arrow will snap to each of the clips as you slide or click it.

Below the and to the left are more sliders which control the clip’s playback speed, saturation, brightness, contrast, and hue angle. All of these work in real time to adjust the display of the clip.

To the right of these image controls are check boxes for the different rendering effects. They are ordered from top to bottom in terms of the layers onto which they are drawn. The top three have optional black ‘clear’ backgrounds which block out the layers below.

Expanding audio renders the clip onto three layers, red, blue and green and uses live audio input to resize the three layers to produce a coloured motion blur effect.

Particle system renders the clip onto hundreds of small layers which explode out from a randomly selected point on the screen.

Slow moving layers renders the clip onto four layers which crop the image and oscillate in 3d space based on a combination of audio input and low frequency oscillators.

Inset Image produces a ‘picture in picture’ effect which is manipulated by audio input.

Download (requires Mac OS X 10.4).
BikeLights Clips (these tiny lo-fi clips of my bike lights were shot with my phone and are the reason for the name, try them out)
Quartz Composer file
Xcode Project

This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 licence.

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