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I’m off to NAB tomorrow and I’m going to try and post some items of interest to anyone working in live performance visuals… I’m expecting some great things from there, got some very interesting leads.
I was trying to post a new version of Quartonian Mixer before now but didn’t make it, apologies.. Apple made back end changes to the Quartz Composer engine in 10.4.5 and 10.4.6 although some bugs were fixed there are some fairly nasty regressions as well. The best I can do is post some work arounds for now.
“Enable Direct Core Image Rendering” in the billboard settings is the cause of many woes. Turn it on and when fx chains are added to the buses the movies being played stutter, turn it off they work fine. This worked prior to 10.4.4 and now appears to be broken so I have disabled all direct core image rendering in my latest internal version. Also the vortex effect is broken on all hardware in 10.4.6, only solution is not to use it until they fix it.
EDIT: ok, just tried it again and can’t reproduce the direct core image bug I found before. I think this was broken in 10.4.5 then fixed again in 10.4.6. Regardless I still have a new version of Quartonian Mixer due out soon 
The next version of Quartonian mixer will include workarounds for these issues and also improved Hexagon layouts, a temporary solution for seperate preview and output screen, pre colour adjustment boost, output masks, screen position settings and several other features to make adjusting the screens easier in live settings. I’ve been working with this version live for a while now but haven’t had time to package it up for download.
Also, www.qcplugins.com has gone live as a place to download some Quartz Composer plugins to expand the possibilties of Quartz Composer. They already have three very promising plugins to add audio output, itunes control and playing podcasts… Cool!
They’re asking for suggestions for plugins… well mine are:
a) advanced midi. ability to set channel and controller number as parameters that can be changed within a compositions. Midi output.
b) OSC support, with networking capability so compositions can communicate across multiple computers.
c) vortex renderer (see pixelshox)
d) obj 3D object importer with some object modifiers that pixelshox had (morph, liquid, ripple)
Technorati Tags: Quartz Composer
