Sunday, June 6, 2010

QtzRendang - Open Source Quartz Composer Movie Renderer

QtzRendang in action

Announcing QtzRendang, a little utility app for rendering Quartz Compositions to movie files. I cobbled this together from example code for my own purposes, and since I couldn't find anything on the web. "My own purposes" typically involve rendering a loopy composition to a six or seven minute movie to make simple but effective videos for Cartoon Beats releases.

By the way, there is another app for this purpose developed by the Kineme crew - QuartzCrystal - which supports spatial and temporal oversampling to reduce temporal and visual jagginess. At US$18 this is a great little app, but as I'm a bit of a nerd and a cheapskate, and there wasn't an open source solution, I decided it was worth writing QtzRendang.

CoGe is another great project on Google code. It's an open source visualisation/VJ mixer/live sequencer.

Back to QtzRendang


Drag & drop a composition, specify frame resolution, duration, and frame rate & output filename. Optionally tweak composition parameters, then click render.

Why is it called QtzRendang? Well it renders .qtz files to movies, and the instant noodles I had that week were rendang flavour. Rendang is a slow-cooked Indonesian dish which seems like it would be pretty yum. I've never had it.

Any questions about the software itself please feel free to ask in the comments.