SubscribeQuartonian Mixer
Posted by roger on February 4th, 2006Quartonian Mixer is no longer being actively developed but full source is available for people to learn from. If you want to mix quartz compositions with Quartonian Mixer you will need to install the Kineme Plugins and modify the patch to use these instead of image with movie nodes.
I now recommend VDMX5 beta or Isadora for mixing live with Quartz Composer compositions and creating quartz composer effects. Neither of these is free, but they both have very good support for Core Image, let you create effects from QC chains and have much better media management than I’m able to create.
“Quartonian is one of those jaw-dropping pieces of software that does something so insanely wonderful, it’s almost entirely implausible that anyone will ever have any use for it.”
The Daily Grind
Rated four out of five stars by MacEgoism.jp.
Quartonian Mixer is a free creative commons licensed VJ mixer created entirely in Quartz Composer. It allows Triggering, Mixing and Core Image effects on multiple banks of 24 Quicktimes, Still Images, Quartz Composer compositions or flash animations.
Why use Quartonian?
Why another VJ mixer? there are a million VJ mixers out there already, why bother writing another one? Why use this one?
Quartonian was the first mac os x vj mixer to fully use the power of core image tech that Apple introduced in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). To this day Quartonian is still the fastest VJ mixer available for Mac OS X, mixing 720p or even 1080i HD video is possible on a Mac Book Pro. It is also the most flexible and customisable vj mixer available. Because it is written using Quartz Composer and the full composition is available you can rip it apart and build your own fx chains, your own screen layouts or even build a custom mixer to suit a large multiscreen installation or custom shaped screens. Eg see the screen shot below for an example hex layout for hexagonal screen clusters.
It’s fast and easy to adapt Quartonian to any custom screen layout, even multi screen layouts. This is difficult or impossible with most VJ programs.
Quartonian is also very stable, it has never crashed once during almost a year of live performance usage. This is due to the stability of the underlying Quartz Composer engine which is a proven fast and solid real time graphics platform.
Don’t want to learn Quartz Composer? That’s fine, you can hire me to customise Quartonian for your large installation, event or multi screen vj rig. Contact me through the information available on the “Eskatonia Visuals” website.
Select the sections at right for more information.
