SubscribeChangelog
Posted by roger on July 29th, 2005New in 0.55
Added preview window, HD 720p support, boost colour control, output overlay masks and many bugfixes.
Quartonian now has three modes. “Practise Mode”, “Blind mode” and “Preview mode”.
It starts up in practice mode with the thumbnails and interface overlaid on top of the main output window in a single screen. Use the “`” key (below tilde) to toggle between practise and blind mode. Blind mode is designed to be usable on a mac mini or another machine with only one video output. In this mode you must write down or memorise your clip assignments. “Preview mode” has a separate preview window, thumbnails and bus previews outside the main output window. Press “command t” to bring up the options window to turn preview mode on, check the option “preview enable”.
Window arrangement for Preview mode:
arrange your second display like shown, suggested you set the second display to 800×600. Then stretch the window out to be very wide and arrange the displays so that the main output window covers the whole second display while the preview window and other interface elements are on the far left of the main computer monitor. Layout should look like this:
Mixing using the mouse is not convenient when in this mode, I suggest using a Midi controller for the cross fader. The Evolution UC17 X-Session is a cheap reliable controller with 16 rotary knobs and a cross fader and costs only around 100US dollars. Because of limitations in the Quartz Composer midi implementation you will have to go into the composition and edit the “mixer position” macro to assign your midi controller to the cross fader.
As Quartz Composer cannot render in two output windows this was the easiest way to have a preview, thumbnails and other interface separate from the main output.
Note you can access the quartz composer window to add new clips to the mixer while the mixer is running using this new method…
HD Support:
There is a separate version of the mixer included in the download which has been optimised for 720p 1280×720 mixing. I tested HD mixing using Quicktimes shot on a HDV camera and then reencoded as 1280×720 25fps Quicktime Photo-jpeg 50 percent quality. Mixing was acceptable on an imac g5 (12-15 fps) and smooth on a MacBook Pro (25-30 fps) both using an external firewire disk to play content from. It’s also possible to save out quartz composer compositions at 720p resolution and mix them very smoothly.
Due to limitations in Quartz Composer is was necessary to make the HD version a separate patch, in particular the “render in image” function cannot have it’s resolution controlled by input parameters making supporting multiple resolutions in one patch very difficult.
Boost:
boost performs an overall contrast adjustment on all clips on all buses. I often find I have to increase it to about 1.15 to match contrast levels when mixing my output with output from Resolume or another pc based mixing program. Access it via the “command t” preference sheet.
Output Masks:
this option overlays a shaped mask over the entire output, either hex, circle or rough with position and scaling controls. It is designed for shaped screens, again it is accessed via the “command t” options sheet.
Notes for faster performance:
You can control the resolution that effects are processed at using the “render mix: lo or hi?” option in the parameters window. Setting it to hi (checked 640×480 resolution) will slow down the patch considerably on slower computers. It is recommended to leave it to the lo (unchecked) setting on all G4 computers or mac mini’s. G5’s and Intel Mac’s with 64MB graphics cards (non intel integrated graphics) can handle smoothly mixing 640×480 or higher resolution clips.
Hex mode is also taxing as it needs to multiply every clip by multiple hex masks to do the effect. Use 320×240 clips only in hex mode unless you have a fast machine.
The recommended low end machine is a G4 1.25Ghz with a 32MB graphics card. Mixing with the preview mode enabled is smooth on this configuration when using 320×240 clips an external firewire HD. In general a fast firewire 7200 or 10000 RPM FW400 or FW800 HD is highly recommended as it will substantially improve framerate.
New in 0.45
This version has big performance improvements over version 0.40. Up to twice as fast frame rate in some cases. Hex screen layouts have especially been much improved in rendering speed. Available from the download page now.The target machine for Quartonian is now the lowest end 12″ ibook model with a 32MB Radeon 9550. This is a dirt cheap vj mixing laptop and I’m making sure all the effects and layouts run quickly on this machine. Even 640×480 mixing is possible with this laptop using an external hard disk. With a iMac G5 and external hard disk mixing full DV res clips is very smooth.
Precise control over resizing options. See description of command t preferences below…
- Both normal and hex screen modes now have eight layouts each so f1-f8 now all have active layouts assigned.
- Zoom screen mode, for cropping the output with a scan converter.
- Exclusive layouts toggle….
Description of “command-t†preference options.
hit command t while quartonian is running to bring up the list of “preference†options.
- Screens Zoom, Pixel Ratio, Seperation Y, Seperation, Center Mask and Outside Mask: These options control the layout of the screens in hex screen mode. By adjusting them you should be able to line up the hexagons or circles to any physical screen you build.
- Image scaling and processing options…..
- resize clips if diff?: if this option is enabled then when your media is of different resolution it will get resize to match the A bus clip. This causes a slowdown, but some effects do not work correctly if this is switched off.
- render mix: lo or hi?: when off core image effects are processed at 320×240 on each bus. When on core image effects are processed at 640×480.
- enable hires mixout: when enabled core image effects are processed at screen resolution. Warning, this can be very slow but is highest quality.
As a summary of the above three options for fastest performance lowest quality turn all three off. For highest quality and if you are mixing resolutions or using compositions or clips at greater than 640×480 resolution turn all three on. This will almost certainly require a G5 and at least a Radeon 9800 Pro.
- Show thumbnails: toggle whether thumbnails are shown when interface is toggled using “`†key.
- Disable splash: disable the quartonian copyright screen which appears on startup.
- Zoom mode: when on, all layouts are zoomed back to fit inside a portion of the screen. Use the next option to display the screen border. You can then use a zooming scan converter to output only the framed section of the screen. At the moment this is the only possibility to have the full interface on screen while mixing and a clean output to the projector.
- Outline frame enable: toggle frame border on and off. Use this when adjusting the zoom on your scan converter.
- Exclusive layouts: toggle whether turning on one layout turns off all the others. eg pressing f1 disables f2 etc. In hex mode layouts are always exclusive.
New in 0.4
- clip thumbnails
- multiple banks of clips
- hex layouts - default is ~ to toggle them on and off
- bug fixes when mixing different res clips - all clips now scaled to fx processing resolution
- root macro layout cleaned up and simplified
- f6 layout improved
Assigning clips has changed. There is now six banks of clips that can be changed with 5,6,7,8,9,0 keys. To assign clips go into the “CLIP_SELECTION_ALL_CLIPS_ALL_BANKS†macro then go into a bank eg “CLIPS_IN_BANK_ON_KEY_5″. Now double click on the dot and drag quicktimes into the string input field as you did before. Only banks 5,6,7 are hooked up, if you want to assign more, hook them up to the bank multiplexors following from I;ve done for banks 5,6 and 7.
There is a delay when changing banks as it loads the new clips. Sorry was the best I could do right now. Good to have another video source to change to while swapping banks.
This version now scales all clips to either 640×480 or 320×240 before applying fx. This was necessary to fix some bugs but it now works with any res clips you can mix and match but there will be some slowdown. For best performance pre scale all your clips to either 640×480 or 320×240 and then make sure you toggle tab to set the right render resolution. No scaling is done if the resolutions already match.
Hex layouts: hit the ~ key to toggle between normal and hex layouts. hex layouts
are exclusive you can only have one active at a time. There is a bug in layouts f5 and f6, the screen scaling is correct in windowed mode but not full screen. I think this is a bug in quartz composer reporting the wrong screen res, if anyone can help fix this let me know. Use the composition parameters “command T†to adjust the seperation and scaling of the hex screens to match your physical screen.
new fx presets:
z-edge detect
x-2 bit crunch
c-triangle tiling
v-vortex - improved
b-radial blur
n-negate changed now takes the minimum value of a hue shift and colour invert
m- kaleidoscope - improved
,- rect tiling
.- pixelate
/- glass distortion - this fx use the key clip as the distortion source, try the plasma_mask clip as the key clip for a good example.
New in 0.3:
- toggle fx processing resolutions with TAB key
- change negate to use 180 degree hue shift
- rss check for new version on splash screen
- cleanup of interface and docs
New in 0.25:
Many tweaks based on using it live. Interface now toggles between normal and "minimal gui", should be outside video safe so you can still see which bus and layouts are active when driving it blind. Also more layouts F1-F6 now have active layouts, changed some layouts for better results. Also tweaked sample clips for better results. Make sure you adjust the audio input level appropriately, many of the sample clips are audio reactive.
now six layouts that can be switched and mix and matched.
F1 is a simple mix between A and B. F2 is three rotating planes. F3 is rotating spheres, F4 maps A,B and mix onto a cube which rotates around the camera. F5 repeats the mix in a spiral pattern. F6 repeats the mix in a zoomed pattern.
New in 0.2:
- bypass fx buses
- mixer curve changed to 100 percent additive both buses when in center
- reset fx by bus
- bypass per bus toggle
- default clip error message
- "panic button" reset all fx all buses
- 12 sample clips
0.1 First Release:
- Three layer mixing, A bus, B bus, key bus.
- Preview windows with "wet" fx preview on floating gui
- 4 Seperate FX buses: A, B, Key, Mix. Endless customization through core image filters. Don’t like the ones, I picked? open up the comp and make your own combinations.
- Editable transition modes including core image transitions.
- Bypass / Reset per fx bus.
- "Panic Button", all fx reset.
- switch and mix 8 composition layouts, with endless customisation possibilities.
- Fastest possible performance, full use of OpenGl and vertex shader effects through Core Image, mix 3 DV layers with realtime core video effects on an Imac G5. Probably the fastest Macintosh VJ program in existence.
- Easy possibility for midi control customization.
- First VJ program to make full use of Apple’s latest core image and quartz composer technologies.
- Free, and "open source" in that the Quartz Composition can be edited.
- You may freely distribute or create derivative works based on this under the "Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike" License. Explicitly you may perform VJ mixes for commercial gain using this but you may not sell this software for money without permission.
Planned Future Development:
- Clip scratching and speed adjustment.
- "bypass" for keyboard controls so compositions can be controlled with keyboard.
- Fader curves on mixer.
- Midi control presets.
- "pre fx" bus with colour adjustments.
- BPM tap function and assigning fx to BPM tempo.
- A full Cocoa GUI with thumbnails and slider controls and seperate outputs (don’t hold your breath….)
