Free VJ Tool: Quartonian

More on work done with Apple’s Quartz Composer: Roger Bolton (part of the Eskatonia VJ crew) has launched Quartonian, a project to create remixable Open Source VJ tools built on top of Quartz Composer. Open Source in this case means freely available and editable Quartz patches.

So far there is the Quartonian Mixer, a full-featured VJ mixer with A, B and key layers for mixing and Quartz composer effects. Clips can be Quicktimes, Flash SWFs, still images or Quartz Compositions. Downsides: Only 24 hardwired clips and no dual-monitor output so you will have to work “blind”. Work is underway to overcome these limitations. The main benefit over other mixers is the speed of Quartz and the ability to use compositions as clips, all of which can themselves be applications.

It seems Apple snuck one more “secret” into MacOS X 10.4 (aka Tiger): Apple says that Quartz Composer is a “development tool provided with Mac OS X v10.4 for processing and rendering graphical data”. But that’s a bit of an understatement, as it also happens to be a patching-based tool perfect for creating VJ applications.

It’s not quite Max/MSP or VVVV, but the principles are the same. And since the underlying technology is the full power of the Quartz drawing APIs, OpenGL and Quicktime, it’s a powerful mix. You can find more information at Quartz Compositions wiki, or the ClockSkew and QuartzComps blogs.