matt.beghin

GrandVJ 1.2 is in version beta4 (link here). It now supports Quartz Composer (on Mac, 10.5 advised) as sources and visuals (partly documented here)
I had already heard tons of god things about QC (Quartz Composer), but a few weeks ago, I made an application (yes, using QuartzBuilder you can convert a Quartz Composition into an application with many options) and discovered how easy it was to develop multimedia applications and how powerful it was (most of the work is done in the graphic card. It is really a multimedia graphic programming environment that make it very fast to realize funky applications, visual effects and visual content (interactive or not).

I’ve been looking at many stuffs people did and many websites and got inspired to create some effects for arKaos applications and more. Well part of my work was adapting other people composition to make it effects for GrandVJ. Unfortunately it doesn’t work in Modul8 because Modul8 supports only Quart Composition in “safe mode” which is a reduced set of QC features. For security reasons, a Quartz file running in a browser must be safe: no file access, no camera access, no audio input etc. But why Modul8 is limited to safe patches ? Anyway GrandVJ is not

First this effect is really incredible: http://002.vade.info/?page_id=19. So I adapted it to make it a GrandVJ effect. Download below. Thanks to Bill Etra for sharing the code ! And congrats. I like it. Creating 3D from a 2D picture is generally of bad taste (int general 3D is but this effect is really not.

Here is the result:

Later on I found this great effect too: http://memo.tv/amoeba_dance_caliper_remote
I enjoyed it and I’m trying to see what can be done from there. Well it’s not as good as amoeba one for the moment, but I’ll work more on that:

Well, I forgot I also did a picture folder player with Quartz Composer. It could use the “text” variable of a GrandVJ layer to receive the folder path, the the movie speed to define how fast it should go from a picture to the next one.

I post the RuttEtra effect here. Thanks again to Bill Etra for this one.

v002 RuttEtra GrandVJ effect

I’ve been developping some Flash animations for using in GrandVJ, but it is compatible with NuVJ and MediaMaster as well. It’s not using ActionScript3. I did some experiments with AS3 and it works much better and allows you to avoid using some tricks to force Flash to redraw each time arKaos soft requests a new frame I’ll post some later on.

These animations are using the beat and audio variables (EQ, audio level etc.) transmitted by arKaos to the flash. These variables are used in the ActionScript code to animate various elements. Possibilities are endless. While I hate Adobe Flash user interface and I don’t like some behaviors in Flash ActionScript with variable types etc, I enjoy the possibilities it offers.

Here is a demo with VU meters and some EQs:

And here are lots of different animations. Some are not very exciting like this but nice when compositing with other visuals.

Download here:

AudioFlashCollection4ArKaos(www.mattbeghin.net)