Since I’m sick at home right now I had some time on my hand to wrap my head around this whole Quartz Composer thing.
I saw Joachim Garraud explain it in his first Invasion-Video, but I never got around to looking how to really build this.
Anyway- what I wanted to build was an interactive visualizer to playback to my live-sound. I accomplished that, but after understanding what Quartz is capable of I kind of what to go even further. I’m thinking about using videos and stuff, but that’s a bit of a future project right now. What I’ve done right now is a small patch with some basic graphical equalization.
I’ll see what I can learn in the next couple of days, perhaps I’ll get an improved 1.1 version up then.
From what I can say now it should work the following way- open the file with quicktime, set input-device to the line-in/mic-in that your tunes are coming from and drag the visualizer onto your screen, maximize it… done.
Yes, I’m using Traktor and generating my the visuals dynamically on a second PC.
I was specifically looking for a on-the-fly solution to generate visuals for my mix that don’t require a VJ or switching to a complete solutions and rebuilding all my songs with videos.
im at work and i thought id try it. great job man! here is a pic of it running on my MBP. It used QuickTime7, and i needed to turn the input to the internal microphone in system prefs. it heard the booth monitors while im djing on cdjs. the balloons-lines thing is sweet. i was playing Martin Solveig at the time.
Yeah, I’m experimenting with it right now:
Revised instructions for best result is-
Download xCode 3.0
Open Composition
Click on Viewer and toggle that window to Fullscreen
To change the input, simply go to your Audio-Preferences and declare your Line-In the standard-systemwide input
That worked for me (to hear Line-In you normally need to open Quicktime, select a “New Audio Recording” and pull the Audio to full)
I’m uploading a screen-grab I just did right now, it doesn’t contain mixing, just some playing around with filters and levels, so that you can see the way the Visualizer behaves.
The sad thing about this is:
My rig is on an autonomous network and I don’t use MIDI besides to select FX and switch modes, Quartz can use OSC AND MIDI inputs, so it seems easy enough to build a Composition that you can use to dynamically render Pictures and stuff on screen.
That’s what I get for using the X1s :-/
Can’t make any promises, but I might try hooking up my KontrolPAD later to the PC and see how well that goes.
EDIT: I revise my previous statement- I haven’t gotten a clue of Quartz yet. Just discovered that you can “Render into Image” and then filter the hell out of that again… More Method To The Madness!
Okay, added a nice Garraud-esque webcam-thing to it as well, videos and screens just don’t do this justice.
I’ll continue working on this, perhaps as a next step adding some Midi-Overlays into the mix.
If you have questions or suggestions, just let me know.
dude I’ve been watching this with interest, just don’t really know enough about it to make any kind of useful comment! Nice video above, I wish I had ANY idea how it was done!
agreed, i think it’s super cool, but i’m at a loss for any sort of usefulness…
so you are using it through quicktime, do you think you could run it and traktor on the same computer through the use of an esxtending desktop? or would the rendering be too much for a lap to handle while trying to keep a low latency?
Hm, runs at around 30-50 fps. Using OS X, I think you could use it with Traktor on the same PC.
I’m messing around with loading videos into this right now, the whole thing was thought of as an easy way to include VJ-capabilities into Traktor-sets.
