Content

tagged: quartz composer

resolume outboarding

being asked to revive rbn_esc begged the question: will the software still run, can i even remember how to handle the complexity? it was an amazing milestone back in 2006 going from two laptops linked by midi to running the complete performance off one laptop. but there was a lot to that integration, and my license of ableton live was long expired. i wondered whether there might be a simpler way, now that resolume avenue effectively had ableton’s session view – in which rbn_esc’s basic structure and audio-visual links are laid out – and was built to be an audio-visual software from the ground up.

turns out, resolume does make this possible, and it’s great to perform from just one software. but, i needed to ‘outboard’ quite a lot of functionality. it’s great that’s possible – to the extent i was able to make my own render stack fed by the individual layers in resolume – but not all of it was me being fussy. the audio side has a long way to go: elastic audio, setting bpm from a column trigger, pre-fade / post-fade effect processing.

video: https://vimeo.com/148427383

diary | 10 dec 2015 | tagged: *spark · vj · rbn_esc · resolume · quartz composer

d-fuser and 4x1024x768

back in 2009, the d-fuser was conceived to mix ‘triplehead’ dvi. it was a direct need for d-fuse’s live shows, along with HD. that story is long told.

then in 2011, the datapath X4 was released. it’s a triplehead2go on steroids, coming from the pro-av market rather than gamers. still, surprisingly affordable for what you get, which is a 1-in, 4-out dual-link dvi box where each output is completely configurable. before even getting to running quad-head, you could take triplehead input, split that to three outputs, and then use the forth to scale that non-standard 12x3 input back to something you could display on a monitor on your desk. i like, a lot[1].

it was a while until we got our hands on one at d-fuse HQ, but we did, and now the d-fuser can work with one too. of course, this has all happened since the firmware was commissioned and plans went to the factory, so the retail units don’t ship with this support. having just stepped through the process for the guildhall school of music and drama’s purchase of two d-fusers and an X4 for their scenography work[2], i’ve packaged up and made good the resources necessary. it’s not quite ready for http://sparklive.net/dfuser/support yet — it involves a windows pc, amongst other things — but the process works, and i’ve even got a nice align grid and 4x1 to 2x2 pixel map and test movie rolled in there.

so - attached is a zip of files with the resources you need to configure 2048x1536@30Hz through your d-fuser and 2048x1536@30Hz to 4x 1024x768@60Hz through the X4.

SparkDFuser-DatapathX4Support-v1.zip
  Align Grids
    SPK Align 2048x1536.png
    SPK Align 4096x768.png
  D-Fuser Controller Setup
    _See support site for firmware v30 and above_
  D-Fuser Processor Setup
    Windows CorioTools SPK-DF-750 v423 with X4.zip
  Datapath X4 Setup
    spark dfuser - datapath X4 configure script
  Pixel Map
    Spark D-Fuser X4 4x1 to 2x2 Pixel Map.qtz
    SPK Align 4096x768 30fps Bar.mov 

i didn’t see many config scripts for the X4 when i wrote my first, so here’s the configure script from the zip in plain, google-searchable, text.

#!/bin/sh

echo '### Datapath X4 Configuration for *spark d-fuser'
echo '###'
echo '### http://sparklive.net/dfuser/support'
echo 

if [ ! -x '/usr/local/bin/vqscmd' ]
then
  echo 'Error: Missing Mac OSX software for X4'
  echo '       Download and install from www.datapath.co.uk'
  exit
fi

echo 'Setting input format to 2048x1536 30Hz'
/usr/local/bin/vqscmd -DeviceNumber=0 -InputEdid=1,2048,1536,30000

echo 'Setting output format to 2x2 grid of 1024x768 60Hz'
/usr/local/bin/vqscmd -DeviceNumber=0 -OutputMode=1,1024,768,60000,1
/usr/local/bin/vqscmd -DeviceNumber=0 -OutputSource=1
/usr/local/bin/vqscmd -DeviceNumber=0 -CaptureRegionDefault=0

echo 'Saving settings in X4'
/usr/local/bin/vqscmd -DeviceNumber=0 -Commit

  1. its noisy fan and bulky power supply, less so. ↩︎

  2. first use of which was this: a bright spring day spent in a dark concrete cellar… ↩︎

diary | 23 mar 2014 | tagged: dvi-mixer · quartz composer · video-out | downloads: SparkDFuser-DatapathX4Support-v1.zip

igloo creative coding night

james sheridan saw SPK-RectPack, and invited me to see the dome setup he develops the tech for: igloo, the company, could do with something like screenrunner running in the dome, and more generally james is a creative-coding guy keen to meet like-minds. well, i was impressed; it wasn’t long before screenrunner was running on the dome’s mac pro[1], and not long after that james was organising a creative coding night in their mini demo dome.

as part of that he invited the london quartz composer group along, and invited me to show what quartz composer was doing in screenrunner. i was happy to talk about it[2], i really like the mix of cocoa for the app, OpenGL + QCRenderer for the rendering engine and Quartz Composer.app to visually patch each client’s bespoke design and animation together. it’s not often i can show what lies underneath!


  1. happily rendering 9600x1080 and handing this over to james’s openframeworks edge-blending dome warper via syphon. the ease and painless 60fps of this blew my mind. ↩︎

  2. doubly so as tom butterworth would also be there, and in thanks for ^1 i could buy him a real — not over the internet — syphon pint in thanks and respect. https://twitter.com/tobyspark/status/433157752073224192 ↩︎

diary | 10 feb 2014 | tagged: quartz composer · titler · video-out · dome · talk

SPK-RectPack

a screenrunner client wanted an animating tiled layout. it’s surprisingly non-trivial to code, at least if you want to go beyond hard-coding a few grid layouts. thankfully, the problem is academically interesting too, and lo! there’s a paper on spatial packing of rectangles, complete with MaxBinRectPack algorithm and c++ implementation. respect to jukka jylänki.

getting this working for me was time worth investing, and i’ve released the results: a quartz composer patch and animation technique. it’s up on github, and is something best seen in action, so check the quick demo video on vimeo.

diary | 18 nov 2013 | tagged: code · mac os · quartz composer · titler · vj

small global: extreme energy

watch, it’s really quite good. an online video is not the same as an installation, but put it full-screen, keep with it and you’ll get a real sense of the mounting intensity and serious subject.

diary | 19 oct 2013 | tagged: dfuse · quartz composer · video-out

hospitality » gig-e vision test

friends who made a cinema camera out of industrial cameras are getting excited about gig-e vision for live video work. as am i.

more on this will come. in the meantime, hospitality at brixton academy was round the corner, had a friend running visuals, and i’d just got our plug-in running at 60fps.

  • soak test with d’n’b frequencies: check.
  • flexibility of just dropping in the tiny camera on it’s single cable: check.
  • image quality: check, the cheap-ass lens i used was surprisingly good, and i have a high-quality prime lined up.

while i’m here, justin has done a fine job with the hospitality staging - the massive ‘h’ fixture is proper class, and the visuals were perfectly designed for a judicious minimum of LED panels.

diary | 27 sep 2013 | tagged: code · mac os · video-in · quartz composer · gev · vj

festival of ideas » animating around a 3d diorama of post-its and plastic

after a bout of yet more *spark screenrunner back-end building up – libPusher, ‘event’ document packages that encapsulate the media and graphic template, the all important enqueue new – it was onto what really set this gig apart.

visually, i’d always thought of the rendered output as 2d motion graphics, the made by movie re-working being the canonical example. but here the content wasn’t coming in from the virtual ether, or just signing who was in front of the screen, we were visualising the venue we were in, and it was laid out with yurts, with conversation threads and ideas coming from each of them. we needed a map, we needed a way of collating the ideas… and one-creative-process-later, i was loving the result: animating around a 3d tabletop diorama of post-its and plastic yurt board-game pieces, with polaroid snaps falling down on one side and A4 sheets sellotaped down on the other.

true 3d in quartz composer was a branch out into the unknown for me, and not without its developer terror moments finding out what it was happy with and what it wasn’t. bottom line, while there’s issues a-plenty with qc’s 3d rendering, couple it with sketchup for quick 3d modelling and globs of javascript to handle the data-scape, colour me impressed. it was captivating watching the animation unfold as the live content came in - and a proud moment.

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: quartz composer · titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · engaging audiences

festival of ideas » channeled through *spark screenrunner

at the heart of the brain was the increasingly inappropriately named *spark titler, collating all the media and channelling it to the screen. it runs the screen, and gives just what you need to be responsive to the moment without breaking the visual illusion. so… *spark screenrunner?

whatever its grown-up name is, it monitored a fileshare for photos incoming from the caption-shot camera, illustrations and data-vis from ciaran and caroline’s laptops, listened to twitter accounts and hashtags, and, wonderfully, got updates in real-time from convotate, stef’s conversation annotation web-app. a technical shout-out here to pusher, the HTML5 websocket powered realtime messaging service, and to luke redpath’s objective-c library. and via the venue’s many-input HD vision mixer and a quartz composer patch or so more, we had treated feeds from above ciaran’s illustration pad, photoshop screen and whatnot.

it might be that you have to do this kind of job to grok the need, but i really think there’s something in *spark screenrunner, whether its just titling and transitioning between two presenters’ powerpoints or this kind of high-end craziness.

diary | 09 feb 2012 | tagged: code · mac os · quartz composer · titler · *spark · vj · festival of ideas · video-out · engaging audiences

*spark titler v3: live brand video [out]

sane control of the media and scenography needs to be partnered with the animation mechanics to handle it all gracefully. luckily, thats what i do – and what tools like quartz composer enable – and i had the best materials to work with in the form of made-by’s brand video. it’s great. watch it, and you’ll also see how perfect it was to be remade into a never-ending animation with dynamic content interspersed with the hand-animated elements.

best of all, now i have the interface and back-end largely worked out i can concentrate on creating bespoke animation for future gigs: everybody wins.

diary | 14 oct 2011 | tagged: code · mac os · quartz composer · titler · *spark · vj · MADE-BY

*spark titler v3: live brand video [in]

how did joanna run the screen? with *spark titler v3: no longer a now-and-next titler, more the means for a live brand video. into an animation template go tweets, titles and all sorts of media, and the user is presented with a sane way of wrangling that media and controlling the output.

the app as a whole is mac-native in the best of ways, with the behaviours a naive user might expect. i’m especially proud of the interface, which takes the standard elements and extends them where necessary[1], all to be used without fear of killing the output or screwing up the content.


  1. suffice to say i now know a lot more about subclassing cocoa views than i used to: say hello SPKTableView and SPKArrayController ↩︎

diary | 14 oct 2011 | tagged: code · mac os · quartz composer · titler · *spark · vj · MADE-BY

americas cup » six hours and 200GB

providing visuals from 5pm to 11pm was somewhat daunting given i’d pretty much chucked away all my random-gig vj clips a year or three back, they wanted it all america’s cup themed, and oh: 1080P.

well, nothing like a bit of fear to rise to the challenge: rocked it, aided and abetted by

  • cuts culled from 200GB of america’s cup footage downloaded from their broadcast server
  • a few choice compass rose type animations
  • some custom quartz composer patches
  • a live stills camera
  • the dvi mixer pumping out 1080P into their system, but the laptops only working at the (good chunk lower) actual resolution of the screen.

wish I had got a photo of the big americas-cup cuts glitch mash-up i had going on, but then again, it was all about how it moved with the music.

diary | 14 sep 2011 | tagged: video-out · video-in · vdmx · quartz composer · *spark · vj · americas cup

*spark titler v2

and how did those live graphics make it to the screen? i sat down and took the idea of *spark titler from sheep music and remade it as a fully fledged cocoa+quartz composer application. the idea being it can’t muck up: animation designed to gracefully transfer from state to state, participant names pre-filled in a drop-down menu, no mouse cursors on the output, text fields that commit their edits on pressing take… the little details that make-or-break a live application. oh - and it exports its title animations as quicktimes for integration with playback pro.

diary | 04 sep 2011 | tagged: code · mac os · video-out · quartz composer · titler · *spark · just tell the truth · vj

la » d-fuse workshop

as part of the rhythms and visions event, a day of workshops was organised. los angeles visual artists - lava had the morning, and covered the past and present of ‘visual music’ works. mike, matthias and i had the afternoon, which we nailed the four hours precisely with a tour through the d-fuse oeuvre and a journey through our particle production process. the latter was my main contribution, and its a tricky balance to give: lots of really cool stuff – shooting, taking crops, building abstracting effects – but with what can reduce down to a sea of noodles and buttons. pretty happy though, good feedback that the thread was there and it all tied up: people got it.

diary | 23 apr 2011 | tagged: teaching · talk · video-out · vdmx · quartz composer · dfuse · vj

DFD [d-fuse/dynamic]

there is now a mac pro in china running DFD, something that has been consuming my time for a while now. the roadshow d-fuse have been developing is our first big foray into automated dynamic content, lighting and audience interaction, and so without us being there for every gig holding it down with a hacked-up vj setup we needed something that you could just power on and the show would start. and so d-fuse/dynamic was hatched, a quicktime and quartz composer sequencer which reads in presets and its input/output functionality from a folder we can remotely update, and essentially just presents a “next” button to the on-site crew.

what i think is particularly novel about DFD is it was designed to output a consistent framerate, rendering slightly ahead of time so the fluctuations in QC and QT frame rendering are buffered out. i’m not sure is the effort/reward of this was worth it, but it will be an interesting code base to come back to and re-evaluate.

for the roadshow, it is playing out any number of four sources at 1280x576, including the generative, controlled by iPads in the audience and LED balls on stage, audio-reactive core of the show, sending the central 1024x576 to the main screen, driving 10 LED 72x1px strips from the remaining 576x128px on either side, and sending DMX back out to the stage lighting and LED balls.

big thanks to vade, luma beamerz, and memo for helping me one way or the other grok anti-aliased framebuffer rendering.

having spent much time i didn’t have trying to get 64bit QTX giving me openGL frames at QuickTime 7 efficiencies, life saving thanks also to vade and tom for v002 movie player 2.0, for which there is patch back with them giving it the ability to play the QT audio to a specific output.

lastly, a perennial thanks to kineme, couldn’t have gone this direction without knowing their DMX, Axis Camera, and audio patches were out there.

i’m not sure what to do with the code at the moment. it was made as a generic platform, but its current state is still very much tied to that specific project. or rather, the inevitable last minute hacking as it hit china needs to be straightened out. it has been made and funded as a tool for d-fuse to build on, so that needs to be taken into account too. in short, if anybody has a concrete need for such a thing, get in touch and we’ll see what could be done.

diary | 27 oct 2010 | tagged: quartz composer · vj · video-out · code · mac os · dfuse

SPK-LEDBall

happiness is twelve hex bytes, generated by a pocketable custom LED fixture on detecting a bounce, transmitting that via xBee, receiving into the computer via RS232, being parsed correctly, outputting into a QC comp, doing a dance, and commanding back to the fixtures via Artnet via DMX via xBee.

diary | 16 oct 2010 | tagged: quartz composer · vj · code · mac os · i/o · dfuse · embedded

audience—screens

there is a big d-fuse production in the works, where the brief rather wonderfully was emphasising interaction with and within the audience. as briefs often do, things have changed a lot since the heady time of working on and winning the pitch, but the core of it is still generative graphics and punter control from the club floor. and so here, courtesy of dr.mo’s crack team of coders is an in-development iPad app talking over WiFi to a QC plugin, where my two fingers-as-proxies-for-collaborating-audience-members are sketching locally and that is being incorporated on the club’s screens.

diary | 06 oct 2010 | tagged: quartz composer · liveness · dfuse · vj · code · ios · mac os · engaging audiences

vbfest » here+now final compile

tresor backstage, 1am, get to the final compile of here+now for the 3am performance. there is never enough time in this world, and for experimental projects on the side doubly so. the dream of just hanging out at a festival…

diary | 11 jun 2010 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · code · mac os · video-in · visual berlin · herenow

particle dualhead geek shot

there’s no denying its like a flight deck of buttons, but props to vdmx’s configurability and plug-in friendliness. full playback control of both single screens and the dualhead spanning as quicktime sources, and a hardcore quartz composer patch wrapping a lot of custom openGL code, fronted by an interface builder laid out UI panel.

diary | 18 feb 2010 | tagged: quartz composer · particle · dfuse · *spark · vj · vdmx

photobank debuts

after a month with a heavy dose of xcode on the side, its up to newcastle clutching two fledgling applications to marry with newcastle library’s digitised photo archive, a bunch of iMacs clustered around a 1080P plasma screen, and the memories of the visiting public. it was a heavy weekend of being there with the installation by day and further coding by night, but out of this a very real and user tested photobank has been born.

as the latest manifestation of my personal practice, and something that will very likely become part of my PhD research, there is much more to say than a quick diary post can stretch to. so the full project page will come, i guess in the meantime its easiest to point the lineage to kinetxt which was - with novak - my first attempt at creating an environment where layers of interpretation are encouraged, and they in turn add up to something interesting and unexpected. photobank tries to address this in a more focussed and repeatable way, starting with a base of media archive, and ending with a flow of illustrated short verse.

at the nuts and bolts level, its a full screen photo browsing and annotation application that can be run on many computers for mass interaction by the public, which are networked to a central computer holding the photo archive and running the central display, which acts as both an attractor for the public, animating through the archive and latest annotatations, and as the writer’s tool for creating and showing mini-narratives by selecting six photos and their annotations, and handwriting short verse around them. all written as native mac osx applications using objective-c/cocoa and quartz composer.

diary | 01 nov 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · photobank · *spark · vj · code
- mac os

são paulo » particle

with the standard in the bank, it was onto the experiemental performance, the world premiere of ‘particle’.

Particle explores urban conditions on an abstracted level. While projects like Undercurrent, Latitude and Surface look at city life in its social and psychogeographical dimensions, Particle zooms in on details of the urban fabric and reveals a web of rhythms, patterns and textures.

particle is also in many ways a rite of passage for me; its not often you get the chance to take an HD film and transform it into the next-generation ‘we wrote the book on vjing’ d-fuse performance. there’s a lot more work to do, especially in creating an audio-visual syncronicity in collaboration with particle’s musician matthais kispert, but we rocked it and got such a positive response. there is a video showing some excerpts of the performance here: http://vimeo.com/5787905

i’m really happy with

  • the staging with an 8x3 ‘cinematic’ canvas behind us and a mesh screen in front, with that projector throwing forward through the mesh into the venue+audience. people loved the ‘holographic’ or ‘3D’ nature this gave to the performance, and i personally love how the forward throwing projector beams the dancing lines and other abstractions of the performance throughout the venue, immersing the audience in the ‘trip’.
  • the twin laptop setup enabled by the dvi crossfader i created and our solid state drives. the ability to tag-team the performance really transforms things, allowing the breathing space to check pace and prepare for the next section. and within each laptop, being able to seamlessly scale from cinematic playback to ultra-noodle is so empowering as a visualist.
  • the customisation of my vj tool of choice, vdmx, allowing panels dedicated to doing creative things with 4x3 and 8x3 sources within the 12x3 canvas. this was achieved with a combination of quartz composer sources i made, fronted by an experimental vdmx feature allowing you to build your own interface plugins, and backed by a set of quartz composer plug-ins i’m working on that scale to any canvas rather than working per-pixel in the source resolution.

thanks to itaú cultural for the photo

diary | 25 jul 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · particle · dfuse · vj · on_off · vdmx · live cinema

abertura3 » *spark/d-fuse noodle

abertura was the first time i really got to throw myself into a ‘particle-esque’ performance, using the d-fuse content with the live setup i’d created. as a warm-up for são paulo, it was a great one: the music and visuals really came together to give an intense show in the relatively small space of abertura’s hall, it really gave me a confidence boost.

i captured five minutes worth from abertura’s documentary footage, and its on vimeo here: http://vimeo.com/5731407

diary | 19 jul 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · particle · dfuse · *spark · vj · abertura · vdmx · live cinema

d-fuse 'particle' preview

beyond visible things like keane3D, lots of work has been going on in the background with d-fuse this past year or so. some of it pitching, some of it pushing along internal projects, and at the moment a massive commercial job under NDA: all things which don’t really get to this diary. but i’m glad to announce a little preview of something i’ve been working on a while, which is transforming d-fuse live.

as part of electrovision on saturday the 18th july at roxy bar and screen, d-fuse will be performing for the first time with their high-def laptop live setup. it will be something between a test of the setup and a preview of the performance that will become ‘particle’, so all are welcome and beta-tester feedback appreciated!

there’s much more to say about what has been developed for this setup, but in the meantime here is the blurb i wrote for electrovision:

D-Fuse present a work-in-progress viewing of their new live performance, an experimental audio-visual triptych exploring urban conditions. Having mastered an HD production process for films such as Brilliant City and Surface, they have challenged themselves to bring this back into the live arena and with the graphical sensibility they are noted for.

pictured: vdmx work-in-progress setup, with amongst other things custom quartz composer 4x3 into 12x3 layer, backed by unreleased open-gl based qc plugins, and fronted by a native vidvox control layout.

diary | 09 jul 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · particle · dfuse · vj · electrovision · vdmx

lpm'09 » qc workshop... behold the glitch

anton dropped into the qc class to show how qc can be extended by installing custom plug-ins… which naturally featured a fair bit of glitch.

diary | 30 may 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · vj · live performers meeting

lpm'09 » qc workshop... by somebody else!

it felt funny there being a quartz composer workshop, me not giving it, and the copy being beyond something even i could even have pumped-up (world exclusive! creator of the most widely viewed online video tutorial series!). but definitely a sign of progress in this world, so props to graham (centre back) and lpm. the class had a good time, and the word was spread: hopefully more interesting work will happen because of it.

diary | 30 may 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · vj · live performers meeting

lpm'09 » more tricks up david's sleeve

this was perhaps the most inspiring moment of lpm for me. to set the background, i’ve been planning a entirely new paradigm of vj interface for years now, have a subversion repository with a project to that end, and have had many discussions with people like anton about how flightdecks-of-buttons suck and where are we in our quests to make something better. the short answer is: years in, far from anything demonstrable due to the overhead of having to write such a thing from scratch.

enter david, who was kinda freaking out about a hip-hop gig he’d been asked to do, as he wasn’t sure how to get the scratch control and 'ting required. two hours later, he had a whole functioning gestural interface for vdmx using a tablet and the ultra-cool idea of tracing a line through a… er… control space along which pulsed the beat. a) genius b) rapid prototyped in two hours c) vdmx is cool because it can host qc, but the conceptual shift here is it works the other way round, a qc interface running in front of vdmx sending commands via open sound control.

awesome. watch the video: http://www.vimeo.com/5019365

diary | 29 may 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · vj · live performers meeting

lpm'09 » serpendity › interface - ethernet - renderer

david, as well as having the content worked out, also had the tools worked out. one laptop as render client, one laptop as controller, linked by ethernet. nice to see this in the wild, its the approach i’m going for with *spark cinema. but going back to the photo, check the number of buttons: truly a flight deck!

diary | 28 may 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · vj · live performers meeting

SPK-Calligraphy v1.2

…and now having used it in anger, here we have

  • Added bounds feature, to give you all the sizing information you need to block out your calligraphy renderers.
  • Fixed a crashing bug triggered by sending a clear all lines signal mid-stroke
  • Added an advanced example derived from KineTXT development. Use space to send chunks of calligraphy to the screen, as if you were writing on a horizontal scroll.

diary | 11 may 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · live illustration · vj · code · mac os · kinetxt · release | downloads: SPK-Calligraphy-v1.2.zip

SPK-Calligraphy v1.1

…and here is the bugfix release.

  • fixed purge last object exception
  • removed unused boilerplate methods
  • added zPos to animator
  • ordered ports (arrange in @dynamic line)
  • fixed x,y mis-patch in sample qtz file

diary | 07 may 2009 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · live illustration · vj · code · mac os · release | downloads: SPK-Calligraphy-v1.1.zip

SPK-Calligraphy v1.0

KineTXT has spurred many custom plug-ins, generally either esoteric or usurped by kineme or the next major release of QC. the latest however probably deserves to see the wider light of day, and so here is a snap-shot of it having just passed a notional ‘v1.0’. its two patches designed to capture and render handwriting and doodles from a tablet, but they should be pretty useful to anyone who wishes for some form of digital graffiti in their QC compositions.

if you want anti-aliasing, you’ll need to leave the QC app behind unfortunately, but if you can run without the patching editor window its just three lines of code to add to the qc player sample application and voila: this plugin and all 3D geometry become anti-aliased. vade worked it all out and outlines the territory here: http://abstrakt.vade.info/?p=186.

if you want different nibs, pen-on-paper-like textures or suchlike… well i have my needs and ideas, but the source is there. share and share alike!

the plug-in is released under gplv3, and is attached below.

diary | 28 apr 2009 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · mac os · vj · code · release | downloads: SPK-Calligraphy-v1.0.zip

kinetxt handwriting dev

a little sneak peek of a quartz composer plug-in in development: spk-calligraphy, a set of patches for recording and playing back 2d strokes. the basic patch is equivalent to the kineme GL line structure patch, but draws the line as if it were a chisel nib at 45° and with a flow fade-out. the other two are what is going to enable a big part of the next kinetxt development: handwriting to go alongside the rendered text.

diary | 27 mar 2009 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · live illustration · vj · code · mac os · kinetxt

mpc screen: sofa edition

and here’s another, in a slightly less formal environment. suffice to say, the tv feature is used a lot more here!

diary | 21 mar 2009 | tagged: quartz composer · code · mac os · mpc screen

mpc screen: tick

i’ve been somewhat remiss in not posting up the finished mpc screen, but thanks to a little cover work there i had the chance to go round and take some photos of it out in the wild. so here is the one i’ll always remember most as it was the first screen to be was deployed in the wild.

in its menu it has around thirty 1080P showreels and vfx breakdowns of the various film and commercial work, along with the ability to browse documentation pdfs and the mpc client and public facing web sites, and 15 channels of tv to flick between. for anything that isn’t suited to that branded, full screen environment, the last option flips the screen into a mac desktop with finder etc., complete with apple-store style desktop buttons giving quick access to all the apps that might be wanted in a meeting room. best of all, it will time out back to the full screen carousel menu, and then time out to its own screensaver, so as you walk around the building the screens always showing something visually pleasing and branded into the building.

its been quite a project, and that doesn’t even touch the system administration side.

diary | 21 mar 2009 | tagged: code · mac os · quartz composer · mpc screen

cocoa, mac minis and 50” plasmas

it might not be the most exciting photo, but this desk has seen three weeks coding a big project for a soho production house. “would you like to make something akin to “front row” to aggregate the content and services at this facility, to fit on all the 50” plasmas we’re about to get in the building?” “yes please.”

diary | 10 oct 2008 | tagged: code · mac os · quartz composer · mpc screen

bbc blast » dance + vjs

not just playing with a live camera feed and kaos pad, but shaping the dance through the control of graphic elements: a simple cross can become a character, a circle shape the movement

diary | 20 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · bbc blast @ serpentine · teaching

planetarium test iii

atari-esque asteroids. planentarium. geddit.

diary | 08 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · dome · pervasive media studio

planetarium test ii

spiralling text… not quite as easy to solve as i thought if you look closely.

diary | 08 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · dome · pervasive media studio

planetarium test i

patching away… been waiting a long time as a visualist to finally have an immersive output, and here i was at 9am having had no sleep due to the slot coming forward from the evening and a non-cooperating field-of-view, camera placement, and clip plane.

diary | 08 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · dome · pervasive media studio

photomatic

a productive weekend: after yesterday’s dome-fu, spent today working out how to tether a camera to quartz composer and from that made my contribution to a friend’s wedding: a kind of digital signing-book, taking and displaying group photos atop a slideshow of the couple’s history.

also heard that polaroid have now stopped producing their iconic format i’ve appropriated here as a visual device… which while slightly sad though inevitable, makes me wonder just how long the iconic form of a photograph will not just be the polaroid, but any form at all.

diary | 03 aug 2008 | tagged: quartz composer · vj · photomatic

dome101: voila!

voila. animating, and distorted for projection via the you-don’t-need-a-boutique-fisheye-setup-anymore technique that uses a standard projector and a spherical mirror bought from a security store. all hail paul bourke and the pbmesh patch

diary | 02 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · dome

dome101: radians not degrees

ah. always a silly gotcha in there. quirk fixed with the realisation that quartz composer uses degrees as its rotation unit, but the maths functions i used for the trig deal in radians.

diary | 02 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · dome

dome101: sprites on a sphere

finally making something of a long-talked-about spark project: immersive and interactive visuals in a dome. hoping to start with some basic ‘chuck a ball about in the crowd’ type stuff, and get to a fully playable asteroids or missile command.
first test: can i tile small sprites in 3d space as if they were placed on a sphere? answer here: only sort-of. they are on a sphere, but they’re certainly not in neat rows like they should be, or aligned to the surface.

diary | 02 aug 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · dome

µ:avit2008 » quartz composer workshop

gave a complete overview to quartz composer from a vjs perspective, and got some really nice feedback. photo by todd thille.

the basics

  1. getting beyond quicktime clips: what qc can do for you
    ie. dancing abstract 3d a la toneburst and memo
    ie. animating text files in your vj sets
    ie. making dynamic installations

  2. quartz composer 101
    your first patch
    dynamic controls
    the key idea of time
    common pitfalls

applying it and getting advanced

  1. qc and vdmx
    qc as dynamic clips
    qc as filters
    qc as rendering stacks

  2. shaders
    image kernels
    glsl

  3. 3rd party plug-ins

diary | 24 may 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · avit-vj-network · vj · teaching · visual berlin

kinetxt: tick

a kinetxt self-portrait, with the isight camera on me rather than our bullet cam on graffiti writers. more importantly, this is my contribution to the kinetxt event working, the interactive text messaging display ready to hand over to novak for tuesday’s installation / performance. huzzah!

diary | 01 mar 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · kinetxt

geek desk porn

wiimote with 2 diy ir markers + 2 bullet cameras into uncompressed quicktime stream converters -> laptop running quartz composer with 2 weeks of custom coding -> triplehead2go giving a canvas of 2400x600, 18” wide when projected.

of course, qc won’t accept the two streams simultaneously. vidvox worked it out, apple didn’t for the own tool. tsssck.

diary | 27 feb 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · video-out · kinetxt · video-in

qc model view controller

being able to code custom plug-ins is really making quartz composer so much better: not just giving the ability to make different types of ‘teh pretty’, but letting qc’s patching world do what its best at - fiddling with views - and leaving the coordination and control aspects to a dedicated lump of code, like a brain sitting in the middle of the patch.
long story short, this kinetxt installation is seeming like a case study in the object-orientated / model-view-controller way.

diary | 25 feb 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · code · mac os

SPK-StringToImageStructure

having worked through the hillegass cocoa book, its time to start putting that to good use. and project number one was always going to be one of the big glaring omissions in quartz composer to my mind: a means of animating a string on a per-character basis.

if you want to compete with after-effects, then you need to be able to produce the various type animations directors are used to, and you need to do so at a decent framerate. to animate say the entry of a character onto the screen, you would create the animation for one character and then iterate that operation along the string. the problem is, rendering each glyph inside the iterator is both massively expensive and massively redundant, but thats the only approach qc allows, hacks on the back of hacks apart. a much better approach would be to have a single patch that takes a string and produces a data glob of rendered characters and their sizing and spacing information, firing off just once at the beginning and feeding the result to the animation iterator: at which point you’re just moving sprites around and the gpu barely notices.

the patch is released under gplv3, and is attached below.

a massive shout to the kineme duo for leading the way with their custom plug-ins and general all-round heroic qualities. in particular their ‘structure tools’ patches were the enabler for those early text sequencing experiments.

diary | 15 feb 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · code · mac os · release | downloads: SPK-StringToImageStructure-1.0.zip

kinetxt v0.0000001

system diagram: discussed, ok’d.
wiimote: check. triplehead2go: check. folder of text messages: check. custom qc patch to enable text animation: check.
blend together for kinetxt v0.00000001.

it doesn’t do much, but its a start.

diary | 15 feb 2008 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · kinetxt

ford vj los angeles » build

hello jasmin and her superproduced content commissioned for the american shows. the (and i use the word loosely) car driving in is something to behold: a “green” monster truck, complete with rocket-launcher-esque hydrogen tanks racked up on the back.

diary | 14 nov 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · vdmx · ford vj

name » desktop snapshot

guess what we were up to. if only leopard and reactivision would play nicely together: the qc osc receiver doesn’t seem to be receiving what it should, and its beyond me to port the tiger hacked-up plug-in to an official api leopard one. that is something that will hopefully change after christmas, when i finally embrace cocoa and the live cinema interface.

diary | 01 nov 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · teaching · name · novak

name » quartz composer 101

straight from a marina in italy to a biscuit factory in newcastle, home of the most proper name. they had organised three days “mentoring” aka professional development funded by the region, and i was the mentor. first up was quartz composer 101. so glad we waited for leopard to debut, what a change: its actually sane now!

diary | 31 oct 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · teaching · name · novak

ford vj frankfurt preview

…and this is what it was looking like when i hit the screengrab key-combo before putting the mac pro in its flight case to start its journey to frankfurt.

diary | 03 sep 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · vdmx · ford vj

quartz composer text sequencing

this picture is but a snapshot of the revolution. it really feels like that. a real let-down of the geneva motor show pre-production was the inability to translate the creative agency’s after-effects rendered text animations into the live, dynamic setup. there just was no way to implement anything vaguely sophisticated without seeing the framerate drop to near zero. structure record, something driven by video sampling and seemingly tangental to text rendering, is the key to solving that problem… and so here it is solved, as if on cue for the frankfurt motor show.

diary | 13 aug 2007 | tagged: quartz composer · vj

quartz composer christmas

if the above picture means anything to you, go check the new kineme.net site. a shell script node - the universal hammer - and structure record - hello video sampler - are my two most wanted features. icing on the cake: open source.

diary | 06 aug 2007 | tagged: quartz composer · vj

*spark titler redux and release

as shown in the ‘pun me this’ entry, the *spark titler was used in nascent form at sheep music, and the promise to tidy-up and release as open-source software has been followed through. so, please find attached: sparktitler-v1.1.zip.

the titler’s interface allows you to take between two sets of title/subtitle, with the choice of four backgrounds: black / green / a quicktime movie or a folder of images. the output window will automatically go full-screen on the second monitor if it detects one is available at launch, otherwise it will remain a resizable conventional window.

it is released with the intention that it can be reused for other events without changing a single line of code: you can design the animation and incorporate quicktime movies in the design by editing the ‘GFX’ macro in the quartz composer patch, and its a matter of drag and drop replace the logo in the interface.

for those who wish to dig deeper and improve the whole package, the source is released under GPL. the xcode project provides an adequate shell for the patch, implemented with just two cocoa classes and an nib file complete with bindings between the qc patch and the interface window. the classes are required to tell the quartz composer patch where to find the resource directory of the application’s bundle (neccessary for any ‘image with movie’ nodes), and to subclass the output window so it is sent borderless to the second display if appropriate. features apart, there is certainly room for improvement, a ‘open file’ dialog instead of the raw text fields would be good, likewise solving the text field update issue.

if you do use it, let us know: operator@tobyz.net

diary | 30 jul 2007 | tagged: titler · release · *spark · vj · code · mac os · quartz composer | downloads: sparktitler-v1.1.zip

sheep music » pun me this

the latest visuals technology development to come off the *spark anvil is a mac-native titler application, made by wrapping a quartz composer patch with some fullscreen code and interface builder bindings. props to roger bolton of quartonian for the guts of the fullscreen xcode project, shared under gpl so expect to see the titler soon once it’s been tidied up.

truly came into its own during the ups and downs of the first day of the festival, where a huge rainfall threatened to wash away half the site. we could upload videos and images taken moments before, and pun the titles out till they got beyond baaaaaaaad. ‘shave yourself’ still my favourite.

diary | 20 jul 2007 | tagged: quartz composer · titler · vj · sheep music · code · mac os

pre-sónar » *spark and vdmx++

showing eloi and sean my live cinema work and the state of play on macs, with vdmx, quartz composer and image kernels

diary | 12 jun 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · vdmx · adventures · sónar

southbank overture

here is ‘re-engaging reactive graphics’ from a post or two ago, in its final projected form (or at least, one frame of one of the permutations i delivered). its on tonight too, as part of the south bank’s overture event, the re-opening of the royal festival hall. 10.30

diary | 09 jun 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · photo · light surgeons

vdmx plug-in: dj style mixer

here is a prototype/demonstration of using your own image kernel in vdmx. rather than being an effect, this is an A/B mixer that means you can use vdmx in the ‘old skool’ way, by mixing together two video streams rather than rendering the whole stack of layers. it also has controls like a DJ scratch mixer, so as well as a crossfader, you’ve got a fader for each channel, and a fader curve control.

to use, make a layer or group for the A channel and another for the B channel, and a layer at the top of the stack for your output. trigger the qc patch in the output layer, and assign the A and B layers/groups to its video input drop downs.

if you open the qc patch, you’ll see the video inputs get resized to the output res, as image kernels don’t handle different sized inputs too well, and then all the inputs are fed into an image kernel, ie a little filter written specially for the graphics card. in that there is some basic maths for applying a variable crossfade curve, and a line that adds the two inputs together. take a look, its not so hard; i have far more trouble with doing things like translating the crossfader curves into a mathematical expression than with the code itself.

so take this as a starter for ten if you’re interested. attached below.

i have my own mixer now that does three channel mixing just how i want, and its really cleaned up my vdmx interface[1] let alone the directness of the processing. sweet.


  1. no more layer masks or fade to blacks getting in the way in the different layers and the preview window are now just post fx and not post masking/mixing fx as well. ↩︎

diary | 08 jun 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · vdmx · release | downloads: spark-DJmixer-v3.qtz

re-engaging reactive graphics

back in the early days of visuals in brum with the most talented stef lewandowski, computers could barely hack video and so the dynamic stuff was a combination of flash and good old mixer twiddling. flash was cool for making loops, at a basic level if you had a few layers, you made them different lengths and they would loop independently pretty much always giving you a new combination with each frame… do that with a pre-rendered loop and it becomes clear you’ve only got a second or two worth of frames pretty immediately. then you could bring in text read on the fly into your graphics and allsorts.

all that pretty much got left behind when i went to the single laptop with the vdmx video based vj setup, quicktime loops or nowt. much richer, much more interesting capabilities for mixing that video, but no dynamic/generative content.

so continuing the theme of the vj platform really delivering on the mac nowadays, with dual-core/decent-gfx-chips and osx/vdmx-in-cocoa, it was nice to have a commission to make a graphic layer for the light surgeon’s contribution to the reopening of the royal festival hall, a commission where keyframing it all would be madness, and new the visual identity of the south bank centre lent itself to a generative machine.

so not quite hello flash again like the days of old, but quartz composer parsing the audio spectrum and turning that into reactive combinations of the sbc’s weave. and given the pain of editing a 4xSD wide canvas from a huge media library, its actually a shame the whole thing couldn’t have been a prototype for the innovative live setups coming into view.

diary | 06 jun 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · light surgeons

spk.mxr... image kernels are go

today i programmed my first image kernel, another step on the journey of making custom technology to fulfil what i want to do artistically. and this one was with real, low-level code: its basically writing a shader for the graphics card, eek! actually not so hard at all, the code was pretty easy, it was the process of working out the maths required that took time to wrap my head back around.
osx is developing so well for video: you can write your image kernel in the appropriate quartz composer node, load that into a layer in the vj app vdmx, and then find all your kernel inputs natively displayed in the vj interface. so now not only do i have the exact kind of mixing i want processing at maximum efficiency, i’ve simplified my vdmx setup no-end with just one panel with all the controls, instead of a mish-mash of filters and blend modes spread around the different layers.

diary | 24 may 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · vj · vdmx

nlab » generative titles

for the nlab remix of people on sunday i made a generative titler, though it didn’t quite work out how i expected as the final patch didn’t want to load in the vj app despite some earlier testing. so vjing for me was largely reduced to changing the section number directly in the qc patch with its output running fullscreen, seen on the preview above. was cool though, seeing the titles drawing together from the bag of words i made from watching the clips: just like you don’t exactly know which way the vjing of the clips is going to go, you don’t know exactly what the titles are going to imply in it…

diary | 19 may 2007 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · narrative lab · vj · live cinema

spk.mxr v0.00001

i hereby resolve to make something seriously cool.
enough talking about the minority report interface, time to actually sketch things out and learn some serious stuff to make it happen. i reckon that given spk.av’s level of preproduction and the way some vj functions have been offloaded to ableton’s control, its at least possible - if not sane - to be able to create a custom interface to partner ableton and extend ableton’s audio to a full audiovisual show.
i have this particular vision of what i’d like to perform live cinema with, but in there are some basic design ideas that in themselves would be cool and could be used to make a three channel mixer controlled by a tablet… providing i can get a vj app to do the heavy lifting. the spk.mxr interface will effectively be the ultimate midi controller that is then patched onto a vj app.
its definitely time to keep the aspirations limited for the time being tho’ - six hours in quartz composer has told me i’m going to have to code this as a proper app using cocoa+quartz. its going to be a long journey…

diary | 26 mar 2006 | tagged: *spark · quartz composer · live cinema interface