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Quartz Crystal Rendering Done NotificationIt'd be nice if Quartz Crystal did something to let you know it's done rendering - a beep, a dialogue box, bouncing the dock icon, or (ideally) a Growl notification. It would also be nice to queue up several compositions to render one after the next. (batch render) |
First things first: make sure you're using 1.3.
It bounces once when it has completed a render. We're kicking around the idea of playing the "burn complete"/"install complete" sound too.
The Dock Icon also changes -- while rendering, it's got a blue tint, and a blur circle on it. When complete, it reverts back to normal.
Dialog boxes are annoying -- windows-esq. Growl is a possibility.
You can also use the ill-documented command line version to queue up several compositions to render, one after another. look in the app bundle for QuartzCrystalCLI, run it in terminal (not the friendliest, I know, but it's a start).
How did you not mention this before!? (or how did I miss it) How unbelievably awesome.
it's hinted at on the product page, and I've hinted a bit at it when discussing stuff between releases. However, we haven't really documented it at all -- doing so on the wiki now...
(I also made it a bit more clear on the product page)
QuartzCrystalCLI sounds like exactly what I needed, thanks. I'd seen that floating in my activity monitor but hadn't bothered to go poking around yet.
Growl would be nice because it lets you route notifications over the network, and I tend to be using one machine while rendering with another.
Good point on the network stuff -- hadn't considered that. (growl just got bumped up a few notches on the priority list :)
Just thinking.. a CLI version of crystal opens up the possibility of a QC render farm. Hmm.. a few spare macs, and a bit of tinkering.. and a HD version of my slit scanning thingy might be possible.
note that the command line version doesn't magically work without registration (it'll deface the output if it's unregistered), so you'll have to manually register on each machine first for pretty output.
We don't mind you using it on multiple machines that you own (the license is yours, not your mac's), but please don't share it with friends or register on machines that aren't yours.
Yep, understood of course.
I've installed it on my own mac, and my work one (which is used only by me anyway), but I was thinking of putting it on more if i did the render farm thing.. hadn't thought it through far enough to consider anything like that :)
If i ever get time to revisit the slit scanner thing + figure out how to divide the workload (I guess I'd need one box dedicated to slitting, rendering out a ton of 1px-wide videos or pngs, and the rest dedicated to scanning) i'd have to install it in one of the mac rooms here at work, when there's nobody around, and uninstall at the end (there's no way i'd leave it installed anyway.. we get audited now and then, and if it was found the person responsible for making sure the software on there is licensed would be in trouble, and that person happens to be me :)
Would that be ok?
we're not really interested in strictly policing everyone all the time about license stuff. we could have added extra phone-home junk and what not, but it's really not worth the time -- there are lots of fun things to be coding/exploring, and being a glorified babysitter isn't one of them.
we trust you (plural) to do the right thing.
[p.s. let me know how the render farm things goes -- we've been toying with the idea of allowing arbitrary time offset inputs, so each machine could render a 10-second clip, each spaced 10 seconds apart. This wouldn't work for stateful compositions, but for time invariant ones, it would scale nicely. :) I'm interested to see how far this can be taken]