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.
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12 comments:
I assume this is osx 10.6 only. Be good if you specified that on the Google code page.
Good point - done. (Yes - this requires 10.6.)
Any chance of a 10.5/10.6 release?
Are the obstacles to making this 10.5 compatible great?
No plans to get this running on 10.5 yet. I know that the code to run the render on a background thread requires 10.6, and there may be some other things.
In principle it may be feasible to port to 10.5 - so I would suggest downloading the code and giving it a go.
If you get somewhere with this, let me know, so we can get the changes committed...
runs on 10.7 too
Cheers for checking that Cybero - did not anticipate any issue but haven't checked myself!
Currently working on simple yet powerful qtz-powered visuals software, watch this space!
Now that 10.7.4 is out as an Update have found that qtzrendang runs danged slow •~
I am surprised that 10.7.4 makes any difference to the performance. Thanks for letting me know - I'll take a look soon (of course feel free to check out the code yourself).
This also might be the push I need to write a cleaner better faster app for the Mac App Store!
PS cybero - do you use QtzRendang much? I would love to know what you use it for.
I made an audio visualizer .qtz with Audio Input patch by Kineme. The rendered video by QtzRendang is not working, the Audio Visualizer is static, the image doesn't follow the audio input as it does when I tested it on Quartz Composer.
What should I do? Can anyone help me?
Yep this does not have any support for audio visualiser setups, if you want to control parameters in your visualisation you'll need to set up LFOs etc in the patch, or download the code and tweak it somehow to extract the audio parameters as it animates the playback.
Sorry there's not an easier answer :)
Note that the QtzRendang project is pretty dormant these days. Apple seems to be less focused on Quartz Composer. Personally I've switched to using HTML and Canvas for animation: http://haszari.cartoonbeats.com/tag/animation
Thank you for this, it has got me out of a hole. I can confirm that it runs fine on Sierra (10.12.5) as of July 2017.
Support for directly consuming the "Quicktime Movies" that QC exports has disappeared from both Quicktime Player and iMovie; the legacy Quicktime Player 7 will import them but just exports them again with the same problem. What a shame but QtzRendang provides the missing link. I hope that Apple does not abandon QC, it's such a cool utility.
You refer to downloading the code. I know this is a dumb question but where is the code? I doubt I will do anything but admire its greatness but will let you know if I do make any changes.
Tony
Great to see this is still working – thanks!
The code was on Google Code before they took it down. Looks like someone exported it to Github for me, thanks @flyingoctopus.
If you like this you should check out my electronic music label and my current blog/website.
Show us your Quartz Composer creations :)
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