Exploring the awesome updates to the Movie Loader patch in the new Quartz Composer for Snow Leopard
Make realtime AV Cutups the easy way – with Lucifer and Ableton Live
A Beginner’s Tutorial on Lighting, Cubes and Audio Input to make an Interactive Toy in Quartz Composer.
Everything you need to get started making some interactive video on a Windows PC
From the 2007 Maker Faire – a project where Video Art meets Gaming and DJing
Show Me Yours and I’ll Show You Mine – live Internet Video Battle at the 2007 Maker Faire.
Introduction to the Lemur Multi-Touch Interface device. How to connect it up, some things you can do with it.
You can’t count on venues to have a proper place to put your projector. Build one of these and you can go anywhere.
Preview of an ambient abstract piece about losing yourself in the holiday season.
Quartz Composer has always had an easy way to play movies. You drag and drop your movie into the editor, connect the image ports and the movie plays. However, its control over movies has left much to be desired. We can set the timebase to external for a movie, which the exposes the Patch Time parameter. If we change that the movie shuttles to our new position, but we can’t get it playing again without changing our timebase. And you can’t change the timebase with an external controller, so this method is out for live performance.
Also, to play the audio track of a movie, you have to switch to Asynchronous mode. In Leopard, this also meant losing any control over playback.
The movie loader in Snow Leopard changes all of that. We can zoom between positions in our movie, while the video and audio play continuously.
Let’s take a look.
Asynchronous mode in Snow Leopard gives us a lot more options than it did before. Here are the new parameters we’ll focus on:
In this short tutorial, you’ll learn how to use these parameters to control your video and audio.
Now we just have to combine these actions – setting a new Selection Start and resetting the movie. I’ve got a finished version of this page available for download at the end of this article. I recommend you download it and open it up.
In this setup, we still have the Movie connecting to the Billboard, and we’ve got two new additional patches. We’ve got the Keyboard patch, which sends key signals through the Javascript patch, which interprets them, sends the Position data out to the Selection Start on the Movie, and also sends a Reset signal.
Notice that the Movie’s Duration is being fed into the Javascript patch. This is how the Javascript patch knows where in the movie to jump to. For the curious, here’s the Javascript code:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 | function (__number position, __boolean reset) main (__number inputNumber[8], __number duration) { var result = new Object(); var slice = duration/8; if ( inputNumber[0] > 0 ) { result.position = slice*1-slice; result.reset = true; } else if ( inputNumber[1] > 0 ) { result.position = slice*2-slice; result.reset = true; } else if ( inputNumber[2] > 0 ) { result.position = slice*3-slice; result.reset = true; } else if ( inputNumber[3] > 0 ) { result.position = slice*4-slice; result.reset = true; } else if ( inputNumber[4] > 0 ) { result.position = slice*5-slice; result.reset = true; } else if ( inputNumber[5] > 0 ) { result.position = slice*6-slice; result.reset = true; } else if ( inputNumber[6] > 0 ) { result.position = slice*7-slice; result.reset = true; } else if ( inputNumber[7] > 0 ) { result.position = slice*8-slice; result.reset = true; } else { result.reset=false; } return result; } |
Using the home row keys on your keyboard (a, s, d, f, j, k, l, ;), you can jump to 8 different spots in the movie. You can also change the Rate for some fun time-bending effects. So there you have it – controlling a movie – With Audio – in the new Quartz Composer for Snow Leopard.
Next time we’ll take a look at swapping out this keyboard patch for a Midi Notes receiver so we can control our videos with Ableton Live.
You must be logged in to post a comment.
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:32 am
Great tutorial chaps.. can't wait for the midi note version!
September 11th, 2009 at 10:54 pm
wow ! thanks for giving me a reason for buying snow ;-) i can't wait any longer !!!!
October 17th, 2009 at 5:01 am
Thank you!!!!!!
I expect to see Shkinda's book!!
Monbaza from Taiwan
October 26th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Nice tutorial + useful bit of javascript for the community. The movie loader is qc 4 is need improvement, however could do with a volume control as i noticed occasionally when disabling a macro with a movie loader within the quicktime movies sound stills plays!
January 14th, 2010 at 6:07 am
perfetct tutor, thanks for sharing
February 7th, 2010 at 3:38 pm
great tutorial and great news about the new features in Snow Leopard. congratulations for the book, its a really good idea.
cheers!!
Prack