Exploring the awesome updates to the Movie Loader patch in the new Quartz Composer for Snow Leopard
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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.
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