A second version of my ‘tiger reflections patch’. Now with a simpler interface and Noise Industries ‘FXFactory’ ready!

The patch is simplifed and slightly more reliable than the previous version. The generated image can now rotate without producing artifacts. The gradient setup is now automated. Less control but simpler. I have done this to create a test composition that works in ‘FXFactory’ - which is very simple to use. It really unlocks another realm for Quartz Composer developers.

Link: http://www.noiseindustries.com/fxfactory/

A second version of my ‘tiger reflections patch’. Now with a simpler interface and Noise Industries ‘FXFactory’ ready!
The patch is simplifed and slightly more reliable than the previous version. The generated image can now rotate without producing artifacts. The gradient setup is now automated. Less control but simpler.

Download Link: iris_quartz_composer.zip
Some Notes

The patch is quite simple to use. For a recent digital puppetry project, I connected the iris radius to a the output of a midi foot pedal so I could create scene transitions in real time. More of that elsewhere.

The patch demonstrates a number of useful ideas: pixel to unit conversion, creating a circle (using the hole distort patch), masks and the ’source atop-in-out-wave-it-all-about’ patches.

Some Notes on Custom Patches, Hidden Patches and Core Image Units

My original patched originally used one of the hidden patches ‘CICheapBlur’ that you can enable by following instructions here.

See http://fdiv.net/2006/09/19/61-hidden-patches/

For the download here, I have replaced the ‘CICheapBlur’ patch with a gaussian blur - so there shouldn’t be errors if you do not have the ‘hidden’ patches activated. This effects performance slightly. With custom core image filters appearing in the QC patches pane, I am sure it is quite possible to distribute compositions that will not run on other people’s machines without the custom CI filter. There seem to be more useful custom patches appearing on the scene with a number of excellent ones from Boinx. I hope a useful installation mechanism can be constructed to distribute the pre-requiste elements for custom patches.

Link: http://www.boinx.com/chronicles/category/quartz-compositions/

I do not intend to post the full patch as it is very dependent on other media, the wii controller and the Behringer midi controller, but you can view the root of the composition in the image below. I have split some of the more useful elements up and will be sharing them in other posts. I attempted (and will develop further) the idea of having a separate ‘buses’ for scenes, effects and transitions - a little like the way (I think) quartonian (and other vj-ing tools) work.

Image (1.8mb large): Screenshot of Root of Performance Composition

The project used some of the following ideas:

• instant chroma-keying and garbage matting of a performers blue face and the compositing of a hybrid character with live mouth and controllable pre-recorded eyes into multiple scenes
• midi control
• nintendo wii remote control of a virtual character (this meant I had to write a custom cocoa application to host the open source darwiinremote.framework ‘)
• Quasi 3D (or 2-and-a-half-D) effects derived from 2D frames - I’ll post some movies of this.
• Depth of focus and pulling focus effects
• Dynamic real-time titles

Some Images and Commentary

A fuller walkthrough of the final images with a commentary can be found here:

Screenshots and Scene-by-Scene Descriptions Link: http://www.daisyrust.com/quartzcomposer/moocher/

Image (above): Prototype of the Garbage Matte and Chroma-Keying Patch

Download Link: garbage_matte_bluescreen_demo_002.qtz.zip

This demo patch makes uses of Sam Kass’s excellent core image kernels available here:

Link: http://www.samkass.com/blog/

Images (above): Behringer BCF2000 MIDI controller controls scene sequencing and properties of various screen objects and parameters in real time

Image: Real-time Mouth / Recorded (controllable) Eyes Composited into an Image in Real-Time

Full credit and copyright acknowledgment to the Fleischer Brothers Estate for frame grabs and stylistic inspiration.

Download Link: movie_thumbnail_viewer_001.qtz.zip

It works in principle but there are a number of issues I’ll go into in a moment. It is an early version of an idea that could produce instant time-lines, retrospective after-the-fact storyboards, onion skinning and other video frame manipulations. I use it to visualize the flow and movement of time-based imagery and to produce illustrations for lectures. It is the kind of process that makes Quartz Composer a pleasure to use. To produce such a layout in Photoshop would take a good deal of preparation and layout work. I love the grid layout and the visual effects produced by this patch - as images in their own right.

Basic Operation

You set the path to a quicktime movie.
Make some basic choices about number of frames per row, number of rows (you need to enable / disable each row as needed)
Set the time interval / frame shift to jump on each row.

Image (above): Frames demonstrating early pioneering rotoscoping from Dave Fleischer’s “Snow White” (1933) with Betty Boop and Cab Calloway (full copyright acknowledged).

Image (above): Sequences from Bill Plympton’s “Your Face” (1987) (full copyright acknowledged)

Some Issues

Here are some of the important issues that need to be improved:

• Performance.

The patch runs slowly. I am sure you could do a similar thing programmatically with QTKit that would be much faster in the generation of the rows / thumbnails. I may even have a bug / design flaw where each row gets iterated more than once.

• Manual Tweaking

It is always a design goal for me to have no manual tweaking necessary, for a composition to do it’s work with the minimum amount of set-up. This patch needs more work in this regard.

• QC Bug - Some codecs produce unexpected results [bug submitted]

It seems some codecs (I forget which from my tests - I mentioned it on the qc-dev list) produce unexpected results. i.e. only two different thumbnails are generated and they then alternate across the sequence. Some sizing / aspect ratio issues of the thumbnails when the viewer is resized

I have fixed this issue on other similar patches I have made - but have yet to implement the fix here. This patch would benefit a rigorous going over. I’d love to hear from anyone who finds it useful.

Additional Details

Images (above): the optional ‘info’ panel and math patch. This part of the composition is interesting and the maths contained there-in could for the basis for a future improved implementation.

Image (above): The basic macro with most of the important published ports

Download link: quartz composer video matrix test files 001 - 003

Notes: These are patches in development and (except patch 001) need some tidying - the published parameters are slightly out of order on 002 and 003, but you should get the principle from patch 001.

I have been wanting a patch that does this for a while and these are really just a proof of concept and may not be the most elegant solution. There are some limitations.

Limitations
The number of X tiles (columns) can be determined interactively. Unfortunately at the moment, the number of Y tiles is fixed. If you wish to add a row you must edit the contents of the “3D Transformation” patch and add new copies of the highlighted patches (indicated below), edit that names of published keys, plumb them in (following the pattern of the others - at this and the parent level) and set the Y position of the new row. Pain. But okay if you know what size of matrix you need.

For convenience, there is an image source that switches between camera input, images and a couple of movies - you will need to remove my movies and add your own.

Development - motion detection / computer vision
I have an idea (maybe wrong) that a static matrix like this could be used as the starting point for a motion detection / camera vision thing. Imagine if you processed the video (desaturate, detect outlines for example or use the “flood fill” that appeared on the quartzcomposer-dev list recently) and had something like a kernel that could sample each cell in the matrix and output a value or a boolean dependent on the white / black balance. I don’t think the core image kernel in quartz composer can output anything other than an image - but a kernel possibly can when used in core image in a cocoa application. Interesting.

Download link: quartz composer video matrix test files 001 - 003