VJ Culture’s awe-inspiring rig. I’ll be toting one black MacBook, by contrast. I’ll try to make the set look like I’ve got more. Some people at Macworld Expo assume “digital art” only means someone working in Photoshop. Thursday night of the show should give them a terrific introduction to live visuals, with plenty to appeal […]

Wireless control has major appeal for VJs and live visualists: control visuals in different locations wirelessly, move about while performing, and, erm, grab a cocktail during your set. (Well, at least I occasionally want to do that last one. All without performing my dynamic performance, mind you.) There are commercial options like M-Audio’s wireless adapter, […]

Here’s a video roundup for you fans of Quartz Composer, the powerful, free live motion graphics synthesizer and developer tool on Mac OS X 10.4 and later. Korg KAOSS Pad 3s and game controllers prove again to be very cool controllers for visual performance. If you’re not a QC user, these will work well with […]

So, you’ve got some nifty visualizations patched in Apple’s Quartz Composer, and something clever using video mapping in Processing: now combine them. Our friend Steve Cooley writes to say that he’s figured out a way to do just that, starting with a Processing sketch he originally programmed for live video. Thanks to Quartz Composer’s integration […]

When Apple released the free visual synthesizer tool Quartz Composer as part of Mac OS X 10.4, they hoped developers would take it up and create gorgeous eye candy. Keith Lang, part of the plasq team that created hit Mac software like Comic Life, has done just that with a new set of screensavers and […]

When Apple released the free visual synthesizer tool Quartz Composer as part of Mac OS X 10.4, they hoped developers would take it up and create gorgeous eye candy. Keith Lang, part of the plasq team that created hit Mac software like Comic Life, has done just that with a new set of screensavers and […]

Quartz Composer, the free Mac developer and live visual tool, can be daunting to beginners. Its modular synthesis approach to manipulating live visuals is powerful, but is open-ended enough that it can be hard to know where to begin. And some of its real power — like the ability to create highly-optimized custom image and […]

Free tools like Quartz Composer (Mac) and Processing (cross-platform) now make it possible to run visuals and music on the same computer. Accelerated on the 3D graphics card in your machine (or integrated graphics on the new MacBooks), you can run live visuals without taxing your CPU, and use MIDI and/or audio signal to translate […]

Quartz Composer is a fantastic tool for interactive visuals, and it’s free with Mac OS X (you’ll need to install the developer tools). With MIDI and audio inputs, you can hook custom visuals up to your musical performance. But the program has some limitations: mapping MIDI is generally slow and arduous because of limited MIDI […]

My adventures with Quartz Composer, the free development tool that ships with Mac OS X Tiger, continue. What it does: QC is another visual development tool with a patching interface so you can create without coding. It’s a perfect visualization/VJ tool for musicians, thanks to handy audio and MIDI inputs: it’s easy to link the […]