Rev Mentor

Tips, tricks, news & commentary for Revolution developers

Using Quartz with Revolution - part sept

Mr. Obleo Beck continues his tutelage of OS X's built-in Quartz compositions. This week's discussion centers around changing parameters, among other things. 

Obleo continues to use repository effects so anyone can jump in and play with these as they are the ones Apple built for third party developers to use. The controls being used are simple ones, as not to confuse anyone (until next week's lesson). The attached stack reuses many of the scripts found in previous examples, but, many scripts have been moved to the stack level making reuse easier. So sit back and enjoy using multiply effects on one image file. Next week Obleo will do the same for videos.


Example stack:

Click here to download:
qc4Rev3.0.dmg (423 KB)

Using Quartz with Revolution - part seis

The intrepid Mr. Obleo Beck will continue his discussion with us regarding the use of OS X's built-in Quartz compositions. These are basically core image filters and effects. Among other things, Obleo covers a new and different option for exporting movies. 

Under his tutelage, you will also learn the basics of processing both movies and images. Obleo uses the power of Revolution to manage the user interaction by making choices as to what shell script will be run.

Best get a snack, a cup of joe (I've been watching Twin Peaks), and watch the video to discover all the neat, cool stuff you can do with this process.

Here is the sample stack referenced in the video:

Click here to download:
qc4Rev2.0.dmg (1165 KB)

Using Quartz with Revolution - part cinq

Obleo Beck continues to educate us in mysterious ways of QuickTime and Quartz. Herein you will find eight example stacks and one stand alone. Each example has it's own video.



The first example stack goes over the player example. Using QuickTime player to present a Quartz composition object to the user. It also shows a few export options, including one that uses os X 10.5.0 (and later) command line tool qc2movie (only found in Leopard and later) to export a Quartz file to a QuickTime movie. The qc2movie also will be used in other examples as we have already seen in part 4 and will seen in 7 of the 8 parts of examples stacks.

The example stack is zipped into a folder it includes two example Quartz compositions files with which to test.

NOTE: To get that timer .qtz file to work, open it in Quartz Composer, click on the Patch Parameters (toolbar), and, in the right hand panel that opens under macro patch, use the slider signScale to get the timer visible in the composition and save it.

Click here to download:
qcExamplePlayer.zip (509 KB)

Using Quartz with Revolution - part quatre

In this video, Obleo Beck covers the main shell scripting as follows:
  1. The basics of using shell and command line tools with Runtime Revolution. Many people already know this, but some may not.
  2. How QuickTime is used with the OSX 10.5 composition Quartz method. (Yesterday's PDF should gave good hints for folks to look into Python for other methods.)
  3. The scripting aspect needed to do the Quartz process from Leopard. A basic core image process and Apple's famous reflection are used as examples.
Obleo will have stacks from this video within a few days. Next up will cover how to be more compact with the scripts, as well as the adding and using of UI elements for passing and setting the parameters to the compositions on run time.

Using Quartz with Revolution - PDF overview

This PDF by Obleo Beck gives more detail of the processes discussed in his Part Trois of Using Quartz with Revolution.

(download)