Most of us have experienced the moment during a preparation for a live event when the pre-produced video that we slaved for hours over gets played back on a giant screen for the first time. At first, we’re a little nervous. The following thoughts race in our minds. “Will the color of graphics match the paint on the set, or the gels in the lights?” “Will the spinning logo be slow enough when it’s projected 30 feet wide across the backdrop?” “Will the tempo of the graphic match the song?” “ Will all of the words be spelled correctly as they sweep in and out of the Andrew Kramer-esque 3D world that took hours to render?” Then we stare in disbelief at the projection screen when the answer to all of those questions is “NO.”

This has happened to me more than once over the years as pre-rendered video files are passed down the pike from editor to playback monkey. (I have been at both ends of the stick, so I’m also pointing fingers at myself.) Being locked down to what was created in the edit suite doesn’t have to be what the audience experiences anymore.

Imagine for a moment that you walked into the earthly slice of heaven that Steve Jobs has created for us at your local Apple Retail Store. And assume that you choose to drink the Kool Aid. Then imagine a place that lets you bend and stretch video content as you now know it on the fly in real time. You might think this place is imaginary. But this place has been around since Apple released OS 10.4 back in 2005. And this ability has been on your Mac hiding in the darkness. You may have seen a glimpse of this awesome power if you have ever watched an iTunes visualizer, or wondered how your screensaver really worked, or in a moment of vanity and silliness played for hours in Photo Booth, or if you ever paid attention to the way the windows suck away into the dock when you click on the minimize button (the yellow dot at the top left corner of the window you are currently looking at if you are viewing this on a Mac. Go ahead… try it. Just remember to open the window back up after it swishes away.)

 

(Go ahead… do it.)

 

 

 

Now that you’ve come back, I’d like to talk about the program that does all that I mentioned above and more. This program leverages the core graphics capabilities of every Apple computer running OS 10.4 and greater.

The program I’m alluding to is called Quartz Composer.

I am by no means an authority on the subject, but I can make some really neat and dynamically fluid visuals based on this little gem that Apple has blessed us with.

This is not the time to give a detailed history of the program, but to briefly mention it’s capabilities to you the “triple wide curious”. What I know about the awesomeness and seemly endless flexibility of Quartz Composer I have learned by riding on the coattails of giants in the computer software coding and live VJ/ visualist world for quite some time now.

 

Quartz Composer is part of the software developer package that is included on the system install disks for OS 10.4+. It is therefore a rather techie sort of software to begin with. It allows you to make small visual building blocks that can be used inside or as part of more complicated pieces of software. It is a sort of software coding platform if you will. Don’t let it scare you, you don’t have to know specifically how to code, you just have to understand that a computer can not really do anything until you, the human end user, tell it what and how to do something. So when you open a new QC document (aka. composition or patch) you will have a blank canvas to start creating on. Just like the first time you opened After Effects or Final Cut and saw a blank timeline staring back at you, in QC you need to tell it to do something. A simple composition could look like this.

 

 

In the picture you’ll notice that QC doesn’t look like much like a traditional coding environment. Instead of a text based coding paradigm, QC is visual and nodal in nature. This basically means that QC does the translation from little visual nodes/ patches that are “noodled’ together in the “Editor Window” to a coded version that other apps can read for you in the background.

So let me try to simply explain what is going on in the picture above. I dragged in an existing logo that I just had laying around. This created an “Image Loader” patch. I then attached that image to a “Billboard” so that I could see it. And then I created a “Gradient” to fill the background to make it pretty. This may sound overly simplified, but I hope you get the point. This example is only the beginning of what QC can do. In the picture above you can see that the billboard patch has several inputs that I did not connect to (ie. color, x position, y postion, etc.).

 

QC allow you change those variables at any time. You can also input Midi or OSC commands or use the computer’s audio inputs to then change those parameters of the images that have been loaded. These changes are rendered in real time. Another important thing to note about QC is that the visual outputs are generated at the time you see them. No video frames are generated until the composition is played. Also there are no default frame size restrictions on the compositions. The viewer window can be any size that your computer can output. So QC lets you create content that can simultaneously be SD (640 x 480) and HD (720 x 1280) and even Triple Wide (3 x SD 1920 x 480 or even 3 x HD 720 x 3840) all at the same time. The file is scalable depending on the output of the presentation software you use to play them and how beefy your computer’s graphics card is.

There is no “make it midi controllable and make is audio reactive and make is look awesome” patch. You as the end user have to arrange and noodle those things together. Just like a timeline in AE doesn’t do anything until you add footage and apply effects, QC can’t do much without you telling it what to do. That is were the art comes in.

 

Keeping in mind what Luke McElroy previously described in his blog posts about designing content for multi-screen projection. With any new tool you must keep a few things in mind like motion, texture, color & simplicity.

Here are a few screen shots of some more complicated compositions.

 

 

One of the reasons we decided to do Quartz Week was to start a conversation… so feel free to post something below in the comments section and we’ll try our best to comment back! Tomorrow we’ll tackle how Art and Quartz can collide.

 

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Jason Norris is one of the guys at Orange Thread Media who helps come up with cool stuff! He’s always learning a new software and taking on a new challenge. He’s the only member on our team with a Master in lighting (its actually theatrical production design, but close enough). Jason was very involved in the recently released Playback Drive. Jason and his wife Liz have one son and live in Birmingham, AL.

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