QuartzBuilder, imported movie speed and audio

ginsu777's picture

I like the quartzCrystal app and am going to buy it, but I cant until I know it will work on my videos as well. I know it places the checkerboard as a demo protection.

the video I import into my composition is 4 minutes long, full NTSC DV quality .mp4, and it also has sound. When I use QuartzCrystal to make the movie of the QC I get a VERY sped up movie WITHOUT sound.

Can someone please tell me what I am doing wrong? This is the solution I need, but I cant ring myself to buy it if it wont work for me. any advice?

jrs's picture
Re: QuartzBuilder, imported movie speed and audio

could you attach your composition?

cybero's picture
Re: QuartzBuilder, imported movie speed and audio

Your post got me a little confused ginsu777, pardon me saying so.

You state this is a Quartz Builder problem [in the title], but it would seem you are most perplexed by Quartz Crystal's offline rendering.

Quartz Crystal does not export sound, at least it never does for me. It is a great visuals offline renderer of Quartz Composer files.

What I do is to offline render, what I'm going to offline render, using the Movie Importer patch set to Asynchronous if including a movie, but without any volume on at all, no point in playing it back whilst offline rendering, frankly, that get to be quite annoying :-)

Some things to check for when outputting through Quartz Crystal - see attached picture and here's the annotations

Make sure that you have the movie sized as you see fit, that you have chosen the codec that suits, I usually opt for h.264 , with quality set to maximum, ensure it is sized correctly as suits your intended output, ensure that you are asking QC to render the full length of the movie, entered in seconds, ensure the timescale is set to 1 [that's like 1:1 time ratio] , frame rate is normally 30 on my system, your mileage may well vary. It' s the duration that really makes the difference.

I've been using QC for quite a while for audio /video presentations, as I often state on my YouTube and Vimeo posts, "offline rendered in Quartz Crystal and audio synced [or resynced with original audio] in GarageBand".

Post Script Edit

Just ran a test on this as my advice is more than a little couched by my usual workflow and desired outputs. Setting to Async or not the movie will output, although some little differences will result. Both methods will not output audio from Quartz Crystal . Look at the slight differences in time point reached. Hope that advice helps you.

In Sync

In Async

ginsu777's picture
Re: QuartzCrystal, imported movie speed and audio

EDIT: I did mean QuartzCrystal. Looking into applying your advice and will get back.

So could you explain your no audio render to garageband re-sync workflow? I read some of your comments on vimeo, but cant really understand exactly what you are doing.

Also, the movie I import says its 4min:34sec -- so I did the math and put that in the duration of QCrystal. Is there a place where I can see the decimals of the final second there? Is that what I am missing? The devil is always in the details.

cybero's picture
Re: QuartzCrystal, imported movie speed and audio

If the audio track is say 1:30 long and I have a video feed into my .qtz comp, then I feed in the video & audio then render in Crystal for 1:30 output. then create a GarageBand Movie file, import rendered movie, import audio used in creating / affecting visuals. Both should be of equal time length. Export as a QuickTime movie H.264 codec from GarageBand. That's about all there is to that workflow . Hope that helps.

gtoledo3's picture
Re: QuartzCrystal, imported movie speed and audio

One small note : the sped up movie result is because of leaving the movie in asynch, for sure. For offline rendering, it should be dropped back to synchronous if one wants to pick an arbitrary frame rate for a QC movie render.

ginsu777's picture
Re: QuartzCrystal, imported movie speed and audio

Thanks much. I figured it out, and it seems to work. I just have to bring it back into garageband to add the audio. Although, If I had to sync some audio to video, I don't know if that would be the best thing to use. FCP for sure if its going to a client.

gtoledo3's picture
Re: QuartzCrystal, imported movie speed and audio

If you had/have quicktime pro, you can use that to synch music and visual, if they are actually in synch. When you open the movie file, just make sure to open it with Quicktime Player instead of Quicktime X.

Open up the audio, select all, copy. Then open up the movie, and go to Edit, then choose "add to movie". That's it. The plus of that is that you don't have to do any further encoding.

ginsu777's picture
Re: QuartzCrystal, imported movie speed and audio

Whenever I try to render in HD or some higher quality, the resultant movie seems to be covered with large chunks of white space, like there is an issue with transparencies on certain layers I'd like to figure this out, since creating an HD movie of the composition would be my next step.

Also, if you cancel the render before its finished, the app crashes.

cybero's picture
Re: QuartzCrystal, imported movie speed and audio

Cancelling the app causing a crash suggests that one of the composition's instruction threads is hanging.

White chunks of space suggests that a clear needs to be used or else that blending modes need to be carefully set [or both :-)].

Preview mode is pretty reliable in Quartz Crystal for checking out for possible problems.

I find I am sometimes having to slightly reconfigure a composition to achieve a faithful offline rendering of it.

Currently I am also encountering a Failure to Render message whensoever I include Particle Tools, so for these and also some OpenCL based routines, I am resigned to utilising screen grabbing.

I do find that OpenCL objects render offline AOK, usually.

Hope that helps.

Also are you asking for one heck of a lot of QC - setting everything, Antialiasing, Motion Blur to maximum will cause the application to crawl.