Artist Futurismo Zugakousaku has posted some creations on his web site that he made with Quartz Composer, a new great technology in Tiger. (the videos are apparently only visible using the latest version of Quicktime in Tiger) If it makes you feel inspired, here a small tutorial that will help you get started with Quartz Composer and to develop a customized RSS Screen Saver.
I wish my iBook had the video capabilities to render these…
Well my powerbook plays them perfectly. Very cool. Just started to fiddle with the Quartz Composer now. Looks like it would be just something fun to play with.
I am sure alot of creative coders can find someway to use this in their apps.
Shows promise of many cool screensavers, especially in combination with RSS feeds
I don’t know what iBook you’re talking about but the lowest end one (mine is a 1.2 ghz with radeon 9200) runs those very well (50-60 fps or so I’d say). This artists seems to be running on low hardware too or at least have consideration for it:
However, some other .QTZ files (as seen on http://www.quartzcomps.com/ ) can completely kill my poor machine. Especially one that has some weird fishes in 3D… (can’t remember the name and the site seems to have gone out of bandwidth).
From my own experience some effects run really slow on “unsupported” hardware (mine) but if it’s just about moving items, fading and such elegant things it’s just fine.
As you may know quartz comps can be run in the editor or as screensavers. I just wish iTunes supported them also. Since you can use the audio volume and/or spectrum as input source we could build great visualizers (especially since the ones in iTunes really look dated as compared to WinAmp).
For those who have tiger you can enjoy (bottom) my own little creation. The funny thing is that it actually reacts to sound input (bubbles grow accordingly to the noise).
http://jack.link-u.com/?page_id=22
From what I’ve read (haven’t had the time to try yet), actually ANY quicktime view can display those, so we can imagine a lot of nice loooking about boxes and such things.. just create a quicktime view in Interface Builder and plug your .qtz inside and there you go impressing the girls. Well not all girls.. maybe Eugenia? 🙂
Jacques: your little app sounds like it could be a nintendo ds game!
hehe.
jayzus…. the file size on these things are teeeeeeny
behold the power of H.264
Those aren’t H.264. Those are just Quartz Composer files, which QuickTime handles natively. It would be comparable to flash files, it doesn’t send the video, but only the description of what it looks like (vectored).
Quartz Composer kicks some serious ass.
Actually, it’s not H.264. These file sizes are tiny because they’re just simple collections of CoreImage instructions. Your GPU (or CPU) converts them into animations if you have Tiger.
H.264 is a video codec. CoreImage is more than that.
So those CNN feeds aren’t hard-coded? Crap… wish this was available outside of OS X… (would love to drop Flash one day….)
I wish my Linux/GNU setup had some similar development tools at hand. I am digging this projectM though.
> I wish my Linux/GNU setup had some similar development
> tools at hand.
It’s not quite the same, but take a look at Processing 1.0 beta http://processing.org/
Less artsy, but more powerful
processing.org looks cool, but the big news with quartz composer is that its a 5th generation programming environment – and nobody even noticed…
They all look very nice and they render perfectly even on my old Powermac G4 400mhz with a radeon 8500 graphic card.
i tried to click and install on windows but it dont work
Being an XP user…I am jealous!!
… of Pixelshox.
http://www.eskatonia.com/visuals/qcc/
The primary developer of Quartz Composer was the primary developer of Pixel Shox, I believe. In fact, the first version of Quartz Composer has a “version” number of 2.0.
Quicktime 7 Player will play .qtz files on MacOS X 10.4, but even when Quicktime 7 is released on Windows, Windows will not be able to play the .qtz content, as it uses MacOS X-only technology (Core Image, etc.)
I’ve done a lot of image processing kernels in QC on my site linked to my name above… it’s a great way to experiment with OpenGL 2.0 shaders.
The limitation here isn’t that QC is using CoreImage… the engine for PixelShox/Quartz Composer relies on CoreGraphics/Quartz… hence the name of the app.
It doesn’t have anything to do with CoreImage, other than that you can use CoreImage within your Composer sequences.
Just thought it might be helpful to sort that out.
I’ve been using QC to build custom effects for iMovie… and let me tell you that the combination of QC and iMovie is a pretty darn amazing little video/animation duo. I find myself using Motion less and less. Motion is a lot easier to use, but it also runs terrible on my Powerbook.