VIDVOX Forums ~ View topic - quartz implimentation serious cool but...

Guest

Hi,

Just starting to get my head around the new program, and i'm blown away. I have been developing live visual material on quartz for a while and have so far had to use a far inferiour mixing method when performing live with audio, usually a fade to black sort of thing between compostitions.

First of all I'm sorry if this documentation is somewhere, I have had a quick look and haven't seen any so I thought I would post.

I had a look at the demo quartz compositions to see how the inputs are configured, and it seems almost to simple, which is why I think I have missed something. To bring up a qtz property in vdmx it seems like all you do is use a input splitter and publish its input, with that splitter attached to what you want to affect eg y rotation of an image.

I assume that vdmx knows how to use the different interface objects, e.g. an image drop down menu, or slider, according to what variable type the input splitter is set to.

My question is, is it this straight forwrad or are there other steps to configuring a quartz composition for vdmx.

Cheers
Tim

Video Architect Joined: 10 Jul 2004 Posts: 1093

hi tim-

sorry about the lack of documentation. every time one of us sits down to work on it, we get a feature request or a bug report and, well, we like making vdmx work more than we like writing about it. horribly irresponsible, i know- i'll see if i can work on the manual a bit more today. meantime, just post your questions here, we add them to the manual's outline.

nope, you didn't miss anything- it really is that simple. set an input splitter's type, publish it in the top-level patch, and it appears in vdmx as a control. booleans are buttons, indexes appear as a pop-up menu, numbers appear as sliders (make sure you set the min & max ranges of the splitter in quartz composer), colors appear as color pickers (in 3.5.1, there's a "sample" toggle which lets you pick up colors from preview windows), strings appear as text boxes, and images are represented as a menu of layers from which you can choose a video stream.

those are the basic types- beyond that, if you publish a number-type input starting with the name "VDMXBPM", it will receive vdmx's bpm from the master clock. if you publish a number-type input starting with the name "MeasurePosition", your patch will get a float ranged from 0.-1. corresponding to vdmx's current position within it's measure. if you publish a string-type input starting with the name "FontMenu", vdmx will give you a pop-up menu with a list of all the available fonts on your system, and the name of the chosen font will be passed to your patch.

props go out to drEskaton of Quartonian fame for helping us whip the QC implementation into shape- of course, what we've got now is just the basics, and if you've any suggestions as to how we could make QC support better, feel free to drop us a line. on deck is the ability to explicitly set the size at which a QC doc will render and the ability to use QC patches as FX....

peace
: : ray

Wow.. that's cool- it does actually work, even for an idiot like me!

I'm impressed. Just made my first Quartz composition and had it animating in VDMX in no time.

Good stuff!

mrRay, I did notice while poking around in QC that there is an Core Image Accumulator patch, which unless I'm mistaken (as I frequently am), should make it a snap to produce the sort of 'frame echo' and 'time-mangling' effects I was talking about the other day. I've

Alex
http://www.toneburst.net

Video Architect Joined: 10 Jul 2004 Posts: 1093

hi alex-

very good thought, but you're mistaken. the only way to produce time-mangling fx would be to have one image accumulator for each frame- so if you want to mangle time within a 15-frame range, you'd need to have 15 accumulators, which is ridiculously inefficient- especially once you start increasing the resolution of your source movies.

you could certainly put together a cheap motion blur with a single image accumulator by simply adjusting the opacity at which each image is written to the accumulator. VVMotion blur does something very similar- but this is not to be confused with time-mangling fx.

peace
: : ray

[quote="mrRay"]hi alex-

very good thought, but you're mistaken. the only way to produce time-mangling fx would be to have one image accumulator for each frame- so if you want to mangle time within a 15-frame range, you'd need to have 15 accumulators, which is ridiculously inefficient- especially once you start increasing the resolution of your source movies.

you could certainly put together a cheap motion blur with a single image accumulator by simply adjusting the opacity at which each image is written to the accumulator. VVMotion blur does something very similar- but this is not to be confused with time-mangling fx.
[/quote]

Ah, OK, I see. So you can do 'time echo' type effects with an accumulator, but things like Pete Warden's TimeBlur, TimeWarp and TimeSlice are out of the question, I guess. Oh well

Alex
http://www.toneburst.net

Video Architect Joined: 10 Jul 2004 Posts: 1093

hi alex-

ehhhh, not so much- unless a cheap motion blur is a 'time echo'. i don't know exactly what the fx you mentioned do, but like i said before- buffering video frames on a gpu may be technically possible, but it's highly impractical and you're much better off waiting a bit for the cpu-based processing features to be released into the public beta.

peace
: : ray

I notice Inside Us All have created some Quartz comps for the VDMX beta.
Wonder if this means they're gearing up to produce QC versions of all their Freeframe plugins....

Any inside info on this mrRay?

Alex
http://www.toneburst.net

Wow... Quartz Composer and VDMX are a great combination!!

I just made something that looks a bit like the Windoze Lines screensaver, with it's rotation synced to the measure position in VDMX.

It's cheesy, but a good start. I've always loved those kind or array-based graphic thingies anyway.

I've hit a bit of a brickwall now, though. I can't seem to get the comp's inputs to show up as controls in VDMX. I managed to do this yesterday, but for some reason it's not working today. The only difference I can see is that in yesterday's experiment, the input splitters were in the topmost level in the comp, whereas they're one-level down now, since I put the whole lines thing inside a 3D Transform.

Any QC geniuses out there know what I might be doing wrong? It's probably something very simple.

Cheers, and keep up the good work guys!

Alex
http://www.toneburst.net

Video Architect Joined: 10 Jul 2004 Posts: 1093

hi alex-

vdmx only registers the top-level published inputs- so you should make some input splitters at the top level, and connect them to the splitters one level down. if you publish an input, it's available for connection in it's parent object- so if you publish one of your splitters' inputs inside the 3D transform, it'll appear as an inlet in the actual 3D transform object in the top-level patch; from there, make another splitter, and publish it- VDMX should "see" it, and you ought to be good to go.

peace
: : ray

Ah, I missed the all-important line 'publish it in the top-level patch' in your earlier post.

I actually ended up with 3 levels of nesting going on. I've added multiple splitters, and everything now works beautifully.

I've got it rotating in all 3 axes, synced to the measure, then have a couple of LFOs in VDMX changing the start and end colour of the lines. With a bit of motion blur it looks lovely! I'm thinking now maybe I could drive some of the other parameters from the audio level at the different bands. possibilities possibilities....

I'm really impressed with the QC/VDMX combo!

Alex
http://www.toneburst.net

Video Architect Joined: 04 May 2006 Posts: 84

The only thing I've not got figure is how to get a default image in the image splitter input, ie in "logo_spinner" when you open the qtz in vdmx and composer there is the hex logo already active, which can then be replaced, but when I create an image splitter I cant get it to hold its image when I publish the input and thereby disconnect it from an image loader. How do I do that?

Video Architect Joined: 10 Jul 2004 Posts: 1093

hi cat-

i've got no idea, but i suspect it has something to do with it being an actual image (as opposed to a frame from a movie), and i've got a hunch that it's got less to do with the input splitter object than it does with one of the other objects. i'm kind of wondering if quartz composer embeds images, based purely on the filesize of some of the QTZs.

peace
: : ray

It does embed the images mrRay.

Alex
http://www.toneburst.net