10.4: Create live-video-enabled QuickTime clips

Aug 04, '05 09:56:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

Tiger only hintI was playing around with the Modul8 demo because i'm about to start VJing. After playing with it for a while, I went to Quartz Composer (QC for short; bundled with XCode) to see what it could do.

I decided that I wanted a live video source from my camera in the composition. In QC, you can do that in several forms using masks, portions of the screen, transparencys, etc. It worked well, but it couldn't be used in a live performance, because there's no intuitive and fast way to work with Quartz Composer in real time. So I saved the .qtz in my desktop and quit QC.

For fun, I decided to open my composition in QuickTime and see if it would open the live video source. However, where the video source should be was a green screen. But when I pressed the play button, the live vĂ­deo appeared. Then I thought ... what if I could open this in Modul8? But Modul8 doesn't open .qtz files, so maybe if I save this file in a self contained .mov it may open ... and it did!

This way, you can make crazy compositions with live video inserted there, and use them in your shows with no need to relay only in the layer format that is given to you. I guess this can be used in many ways, but it depends on the needs you have and what you want to do. I've had already several great ideas to use it. I used the example of Modul8, but this may work for many other apps that use QuickTime, even Keynote I guess; it would be fun to have live video in a presentation.

[robg adds: I tried using a video-feed QC composition in Keynote, but didn't have much luck -- it would place properly, and the video feed shows up when you press Play on the QuickTime tab of the Inspector, but in presentation mode, the video is absent. Still, the ability to save a video feed as part of a composition that can be opened by other QuickTime-aware applications presents some interesting possibilities...]

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