Play a Movie in Quartz Composer

To play a movie in QC, we need to do two things: Generate an Image, and then Render it somewhere.

1. Open a new blank document in Quartz Composer
2. Drag a movie file from the Finder onto your QC canvas.
   Now the image is generated – if you hover your mouse over the ‘image’ output on the movie patch you just created, you will see it play in a little preview. Time to render it.
3. Drag a Billboard from the patch list on the left onto your canvas.
4. Click and drag from the image output of the Movie patch to the image input of the Billboard patch.
   In your viewer, you should now see the movie playing.
   • If you can’t see your viewer, press Shift-Apple-V to bring it up.
   • Your movie should be playing now – but it only takes up half the screen.
   • Hover your mouse over the width input on the Billboard patch – you’ll see that the width is set to 1.
   • This is how QC’s coordinate system works. The left side of the screen is -1, the right side is +1. To stretch from edge to edge, we need a width of 2.
     
5. Click on the Billboard patch to select it, then move over to your inspector window (press Apple-I if your inspector is not visible).
6. Click the right-facing arrow to move to page 2 of your Inspector, and then change the value for the Billboard’s width to 2 by typing it in.

Your movie should now be stretching edge-to-edge in your viewer.