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Posted by roger on July 29th, 2005
Installation and Quick Start Guide:
You must have Quartz Composer installed to use this. Install XCode from your Tiger DVD to obtain Quartz Composer. Download Quartonian and the Sample Quartz Compositions. To assign your clips you have to edit the “clip selection” macro.
Quartonians default key layout uses all the function keys F1-F12 so you will need to make sure they are not mapped to anything else especially you may need to change expose settings. Personally I change all the expose mappings to Command-Function key. You dont want to accidently trigger expose when performing anyway….
Here is how to get started:
“`” (the ~ key) toggles the floating gui between practise mode and blind mode that is useful for performing on a mac mini or another computer with only one video output.
Hit command T to bring up the preferences sheet and enable the “enable preview” to enable a seperate preview window for live performance. See the changelog release notes for version 0.55 for detailed instructions.
Left/right mouse mixes between A and B bus, or you can assign a midi controller to the cross fader by editing the “mixer position” macro.
use the Arrow keys to set target bus to A (left), B (right), Key (down), Mix (up).
The target bus affects clips and fx. The next clip or fx goes to the target bus when triggered. Currently triggering clips to the mix does nothing but in future it may assign the same clip to both A and B.
The keys 1-4 also choose A,B,Key,Mix respectively and as well shift 1 will bypass all effects on that bus (they stay active but are not applied) and alt 1 will reset all effects on that bus. So you can independantly reset or bypass each individual fx bus.
For the “Panic Button” to reset all fx all buses hit the delete key (above return on the keyboard).
Use keyboard rows “Q-]” and “A-\” to trigger clips to the target bus.
F1-F8 switches on and off layouts. F1 is a simple mix between A and B. F2 is three rotating planes. F3 is rotating spheres, F4 a cube which rotates around us. F5 repeats the mix in a spiral pattern. F6 repeats the mix in a zoomed pattern.
Layouts do not use core image filters so you can still mix and “fly clips around” in layouts reasonably fast even on a machine with a slow graphics card.
F9-F12 toggle four “transition modes”. Currently “F9″ additive mix, “F10″ luma key, “F11″ exclusion , “F12″ Darken
keyboard row “z-/” toggles core image filter fx on or off on target bus. Default fx in this version are: “z” edge detect, “x” edge work (slow), “c” circle mask, “v” vortex, “b” radial blur, “n” negate, “m” kaleidoscope, “,” tile, “.” pixelate, “/” bloom.
Command-F toggles full screen rendering on and off. For best live performance in current version, turn on mirroring and lower your display resolution to 800×600 unless you have a very fast computer.
Use the command t option “render mix: lo or hi?” to toggle fx processing between 640×480 and 320×240. On a slower computer without full core image acceleration only use 320×240 quicktimes and disable the “render mix: lo or hi?” checkbox to use low res fx processing. You should see a significant speed up in framerate. Don’t try and mix compositions on a slower computer, stick to straight quicktime mixing and triggering.
Detailed Instructions for Assigning Clips:
Quartonian will start up with 12 included clips assigned to Q-] row of keys. You must first use the arrow keys or 1-4 to choose a target bus before triggering a clip. Clips trigger in the target bus until you change it.
To assign your own clips follow the instructions below:
Double click on the macro “ALL_CLIPS_ALL_BANKS” in the editor window. Scroll to the left to see the rows of clip banks, double click on a bank eg “bank 5″. Double click the circular dot next to “movie path” on each node. You can then drag a movie from the finder onto the text entry field to assign the clip. You can drag still images, quicktimes, flash swf files or complete Quartz Composer compositions into the clip nodes. You might want to write down your clip assignments.
The screen shots at top of page show you exactly how to do it.
Note, if you want to include a Quartz Composer composition and have keyboard or mouse controls active for that composition you have to drag the composition in as a macro and use the “render in image” node to render it to an image that can be plugged into the muliplexors for clip selection. Otherwise it will render it as if it was a Quicktime so you lose the interactivity. Quartz Composer compositions read as quicktimes can still have audio interactivity and midi controls assigned.
Tutorials on designing your own layouts, changing effects chains and mapping midi controls are still to come.
