this is possible through the use of Quartz Composer files. if you're using a mac. there are many examples of Quartz compositions that react in sync music using lines, graphics, colors, photos, spectrum analyzers, etc. You'll find examples on this site and the interwebs.

Now only if we had a Milkdrop preset. That plugin still blows my mind

ever see what your cpu util is while milkdrop is running?

Programing your own Quartz stuff is hard. I'm still pretty new to it. Wish there was a way to have it randomly change the qtz file every so often so ya could just let it run instead of having to change it all the time. Most of the ones I have found so far are fairly simple.

yeah its nuts, fullscreen while listening to FLAC at ~8% cpu total

Bumping this because I'd love to have milkdrop too... Surely it's possible?

personally I label all my EDM videos that make no sense "stock" in the title...

theres so many that make ZERO sense... but are visually amazing, and no lip flap.
lots of fatboy slim ;)

then in mix emergency you just tweak the effect parameters to respond to
bass, or velocity on both knobs...
viola'
you know have visuals that either mildly react to the music.
or crank up the amount and have it not recognizable at all.
but all the effects will pop to what ever your playing.

Yeah, that's the way I can see myself going - lots of 'this'll go with anything' type vids, and then gradually make stuff for tracks where I get an idea...

The Quartz pics/vids folder slideshow one would be pretty handy too...

I think this is possible, you can get quartz files to load other quartz files, or so I heard, I'm going to be looking into it soon.

Any suggestions for us PC users (besides "get a Mac")? I use the mic-in on my PC and have G-Force running behind the VSL output window. If I'm gonna be playing audio only files for a while I just minimize the VSL window and G-Force will be displayed.
I do have a ton of viz loops but it's a hassle having to add them to each mp3 especially when your mixing live.

Rage,

i can not think of much, except "get a mac."
there aren't visualizers for pc (that won't tax your comp)?

even to fix the hassle of adding viz loops to mp3 is solved with a mac and ME.

best thing i can think of is a video switcher and a dvd player running ambients.

Thanks, G-Force doesn't tax the CPU that much. For most of my video gigs I use my desktop which has a 2.6ghz quad core CPU and decent video card. I have no problems (I just make sure to close any extra processes like iTunes Helper and other useless crap).

This past weekend while I was bored in my hotel room I managed to get G-Force running off my $300 netbook while running Serato at the same time.
www.facebook.com
Might start doing that for smaller gigs where I don't need to use VSL.

I just bought G-force and will test it out tonight. I have a gig this weekend that I want to try this out on.

Just know that technically we're not supposed to use it for a public performance (it's in their TOS) but then again we're not supposed to use any music purchased off of iTunes either for the same reason.

You mean to say your a DJ who doesn't use licensed music!!!! Im pretty sure most of the people on here are not licensed, which kinda sucks. I would be nice to know that the artist are getting there share. but realistically we all know that artist make fuck all of record sales now a day's, it all goes to the record company. :(

What is this G-force thing? can it be use with ME or VSL?

www.soundspectrum.com

I think running Syphon out of ME, then using that as a layer on top of the ME feed would be dope... maybe drop the opacity and use a chroma blend mode... lil something extra
especially in those EDM sets.

I did some pretty crazy stuff in an EDM set this weekend using the new features of 2.0 and all tracks with no videos (paired with some generic videos).... crazy crazy....
its going to the point of not having a video for track for a song will be cool as hell, rather than
ohhh shit I gotta rig this up to look good now....

STOP TEASING ME ABOUT ME 2.0!!!!!! where is the remix report video with the preview of it????? I really want some way better vizulization or visuals program to use when playing tracks without a video. Some of the visuals that gforce and there other programs do are pretty sweet compared to any sweet qtz i have ever seen. I got no problem paying for good visuals. I just dont want to by generic video loops, i want beat efx that i can load into ME or some other VJ program. Im thinking of starting to use Grand VJ at the same time now, and syphon video from ME into it. But then i will need to buy another apc40 for visuals. :(

No I'm just throwing it out there for clarity's sake. I rarely purchase any music from iTunes. I get just about all my music from pools such as Promo Only, TM Century etc.

Another completely different option would be to get an app like "Rabbit Hole" which has similar effects to G-Force but runs on iOS (iPhone, iPod touch etc). Then you can use the video out from your i-device, which might require a video switcher or switching inputs on your display/projector if your jumping back and forth between your visualization and VSL/ME

I really want g-force or some other app like that to run as a plugin into ME or serato video. Aeno looks way cooler than G-force in my opinion, but either of these programs can be run in side some other VJ software, which sucks cause they look so much cooler than any of the free quartz compositions i have found out there.

If anybody knows where to buy some really nice looking quartz compositions let me know.

Simple trick...

Play your song with G-Force, Windows Media Player, MusicMatch, or any other visualization software... record (capture) the video and re-sync the audio track back to it for an instant ambient video. Slick for songs that you don't have videos for, but don't want blank screen.

Just curious... What's the video quality on something like those visualizes though, do they put out at least a nice image, even hd?

Depends on the capture software. I've used "GrabIt" and Pinnacle Studios. Both are OK for generic visuals. I don't think it's HD and my screen is only 4:3 aspect. I try to crop most generic visuals down to that anyway to avoid videos that don't blend well or fill up the screen. NHC Video Video Pad does a nice job of rendering mp4 video with little loss. If I buy HD videos from SmashVids or iTunes, I won't crop them... loose too much quality.

Thats a good idea, but i also own the program called One Idea made by the mixed in key guys, and well that program dose pretty much that exact thing.

Cool. I'll look into it.

Code:E, can you tell us a bit more about One Idea?

I could be tempted when the mac version comes out, but there are no real examples of finished videos on their site, it all seems a bit vague for my liking.

Is there enough content included to do loads of videos without repetition?

And how well do you find it works?

I really have only made 2 videos with it because i have been so busy.
I find the program very easy to understand and get started with.
A mac version would be nice but im a PC guy at heart and all my home computers are PC's so im fine wit working with it on my home computer with the 24 ich monitors.
Ya i havent seen alot of people jumping on liking it, and there was a lot of hate for it when it 1st came out. All the hate come from pro video editors (who use programs like final cut) who felt that it made there job seem to easy. Also they all found that the program proved no use to them, because it wasn't powerful enough. Im no video editor (yet) and i have found it a great tool to get started with. There is a fair bit of included content, and if you buy the extra content plus the ability to tweak all of the efx pretty far, you shouldnt get board right away. But i think you can get board. theres lots it cant do yet. But if you like me and you play mostly music videos and you got some EDM tracks without video, so maybe 10-15% of the tracks you play need a video i dont think your crowed will get board seeing the videos you make. So yes you can do some repetition but i think only your dedicated video fans will notice the face that some of the video look similar.
Now most of the video's can look pretty sweet, and i had a play when playing a all EDM show to fire 20 projectors over my head and onto the crowed. Seen it done before by other producers. and it looks sweet when you got good beat effected videos with vibrant colours and black area's. SO for making videos for that sort of thing i think this is great.
As far as its functionality, Never had it crash, all of the efx happen right on beat just like you want them too. the time line works great. and its really easy to get started. I will post the link to the 1 video i made and posted on youtube. the other video i have made i never posted online. This video i made was just so i could see how well the program works. so please dont think its going to be something amazing.

WOw so i just watched that video again, and its bad, but hopfully you get some sort of idea on what it can do. Also to note i made this video with the beta of the program when the beta came out a long time ago. so there are many new features since then. I havent played with it much in the past while because i have been trying to learn quartz composer instead. youtu.be

Thanks for the tip. I checked out One Idea as well and think I might bite. The visuals expansion pack looked pretty entertaining!

I have One Idea too but I didn't like the render options. No option to tell it what frame rate you wanna render to. I even told them about it on their forum and explained how it was important but they didn't seem to care. I stopped using it after that and moved up to Sony Vegas.

Has anybody got a Quartz file for webcam input?

There was one included with the VSL examples, serato.com but the picture seemed tiny, maybe you can modify that.

I just loaded quartz composer last night, my head assploded. Anyone know of some good tutorials besides maybe what I found?

I've been learning it for around 3 months now, my thoughts. I'm a developer by trade, but nothing like QC and I don't deal with graphics much, so it was all a bit daunting.

Tutorials and documentation are thin on the ground, most patches only have a brief description and can be a real mystery, they mostly seem to assume you have knowldege of wtf you are doing, which I didn't.

It's hard to get your head around at first as you're completely unfamiliar with the library. Stick with simple obvious stuff first, like moving cubes about and such. Also, the sprite is very useful and forms a good building block for 2d work. Render in Image is very useful too.

Use the "rendering destination dimensions" patch and math to work out relative positions of objects where possible, rather than giving geoms absolute coordinates, it will scale later.

Make sure your clear patch is the first layer (shown on the top right corner of each patch), you always need a clear patch if you're doing animations, if it's not there or it's on the wrong layer, it prob explains what's going wrong.

One of the most important things to get your head round is making sure you know what types of inputs and outputs there are, numbers, indexes, structures, images and so on, most of the number ones are interchangeable.

You can find the port type by hovering over them. They also show what's being output. However, the actual output is not shown if there's no final destination or consumer patch! It took me several days to work this out, it makes you think something is broken that isn't, but I guess it's for speed.

Iterators are great, but not everything works completely inside them, shadows for instance, and other things. They can be nested, and you can publish ports from sub patches to get info all the way through.



There's an interaction patch that lets you link to geometries and make mouse control easy, I did not find this for one month and had wrote my own mouse control system. The interaction patch is in most regards, much better.

It can be a steep learning curve, I made a brief bit of progress after a day or so, then struggled for a couple of weeks, but now it's becoming easier and I'm moving on to more advanced things.

I needed to learn my math again, algebra, trig, rotating and transforming coordinates and matrices. Not essential at first, but you soon find yourself breaking out the pen and paper.

I think there's a bunch of example files in the developer/library/graphics directory, but essentialy, going through examples was the way I learnt most, some of it I didn't understand but just tried to copy anyway and learn through trial and error.

Some resources I've been using most

kineme.net - Great tools and a good forum full of examples.
1024d.wordpress.com - Some really useful patches
www.georgetoledo.com - Some very interesting posts, some complex, some simple.

Just noticed it's quitting time, maybe I'll post up more things later.

one more thing, really important, save your work often, QC can be a bit flaky.

Thanks for that post SeriousCyrus, trying to work out QC myself at the moment and good straightforward advice like that is a rarity, it seems.

Also, thanks Code:E for the indepth summary of One Idea. I guess I'll have a closer look when the mac version drops, even if flawed, it sounds like its worth a punt.

Simple things in QC just aren't obvious, I just figured out you can drop various files into the editor, and it automatically sets the correct patch.

3 months man, I've been using it 3 months and typing in stupid pathnames everytime.

Why can't thy just say that somewhere, "BTW you can drag media files straight in", did I miss it? Is that sort of thing obvious to others?

Maybe we should have a QC thread to share tips.

YES!!!!! Maybe start one and ask the serato people to make it sticky!!! and we can add all of the good tutorial videos we fine, and post any tips, and share any creation that we have made. :)

Supposedly the Dev tips from Apple are supposed to be a decent start, I didn't get into them yet, but from what I've read, some of the complaints are that the obvious things aren't mentioned or explained little.

Where are they? I've found the mailing list, but I haven't found any forums, the mailing list seems very hard to search and get anything useful from. I think there used to be tools for dealing with mailing lists, is there something I should be using?.

You can search the apple dev website for quartz composer, and there are examples to download, but little in the way of user input. It doesn't seem setup for just browsing, you have to search.

developer.apple.com

developer.apple.com


This is all I found and bookmarked, didn't go into it at all, and there may be more out there.