I really like Crystal - thanks for your hard work on making effective (and affordable!) tools for QC.
I had one question, though: is it possible to render a video with an alpha channel? Or is there some way to end up without a black background in the movie?
Apologies if this has been addressed or is a misguided question.
farinuts wrote: is it possible to render a video with an alpha channel? Or is there some way to end up without a black background in the movie?
It's possible, and it happens automatically. QuickTime Player will not show alpha channel stuff (it'll just show up black), but you can drop alpha-encoded movies in QC, render to a sprite in Over blend mode, and see transparent regions.
Only some codecs support alpha channels -- Animation, PNG, TIFF, and maybe a couple others do. H264, MPEG4, JPEG, and others, do not.
The image sequence outputs all include alpha channel data, with the exception of JPEG.
I'm wondering about the performance compared to using an automator script to output a movie from a qtz file? Do the antialiasing and blur decrease performance? For example, take an example qtz project such as screensaver and output a 1 minute length quicktime at youtube resolution. Compare the time it takes for automator and for QuartzCrystal. I am most interested in offline rendering. Thanks!
automator (at least on Leopard -- haven't checked on Snow Leopard) only makes "stub" movies -- .qtz's embedded in .movs (so safemode-banned patches won't work, plugins won't work on remote machines without the plugins installed, windows/linux machines can't view the movies at all, etc).
Antialiasing and motion blur do add a fair amount to the render time -- antialiasing will use significantly more memory, and requires some core image filtering. Motion blur requires rendering several frames for each output frame, so using 128x motion blur will require 128 times as many frames to be rendered (taking about 128 times longer).
We also use the software renderer for consistency -- this makes it a bit slower, but guards the movies from all the various GPU render quirks that exist out there (however, the core image filtering stuff for Antialiasing/motion blur will still use the GPU, and have some quirks because of that :/)
I'm doing a job at the moment that involves a .qtz running 24/7 doing timelapse on a live video feed. That dumps out a .jpeg once a minute, but I then do an hourly video using the files - QuartzCrystalCLI works like a dream for this!
Just wanted to say thanks, and let you know that these things are in active use out there :)
Any chance of removing the 2K output frame limitation ... urgently? I'm hoping to create a 3840x1080 movie, using a Matrox dualhead2go to drive 2 HD displays.
done. use the command line app (it's in the QCrystal bundle), which has no such limitation (the caveat being that you can create invalid contexts, which will then fail if you crank up AA).
I'm trying to get this going. I'm hopeful it will get around the hardware limitation on Apples Image Printer plugin (developer sample code) on pixel dimensions.
So far I have had a crash (1st attempt using 1024x940, I think) with malaloc errors etcetc and the other times it seems to do something for half a minute but the I can't find any resultant files. Any hints?
I would look at the OpenGL Info patch and see what it lists as max texture/render size. That may help at least see if to 1024x940 crash is expected...
...that seems pretty lo-rez to be triggering a crash though. I've had a handful of compositions that are problematic running at larger sizes though.... some intense pixel shader stuff comes to mind.
Great job guys!! thnx
i can't render to quicktime pro sometimes he do and mostly he do not. Why is that?
i use version 1.4
and system is leopard 10.5.7 Mac pro Quad Core 2 x 3.0 Ghz
I really like Crystal - thanks for your hard work on making effective (and affordable!) tools for QC.
I had one question, though: is it possible to render a video with an alpha channel? Or is there some way to end up without a black background in the movie?
Apologies if this has been addressed or is a misguided question.
It's possible, and it happens automatically. QuickTime Player will not show alpha channel stuff (it'll just show up black), but you can drop alpha-encoded movies in QC, render to a sprite in Over blend mode, and see transparent regions.
Only some codecs support alpha channels -- Animation, PNG, TIFF, and maybe a couple others do. H264, MPEG4, JPEG, and others, do not.
The image sequence outputs all include alpha channel data, with the exception of JPEG.
I'm wondering about the performance compared to using an automator script to output a movie from a qtz file? Do the antialiasing and blur decrease performance? For example, take an example qtz project such as screensaver and output a 1 minute length quicktime at youtube resolution. Compare the time it takes for automator and for QuartzCrystal. I am most interested in offline rendering. Thanks!
automator (at least on Leopard -- haven't checked on Snow Leopard) only makes "stub" movies -- .qtz's embedded in .movs (so safemode-banned patches won't work, plugins won't work on remote machines without the plugins installed, windows/linux machines can't view the movies at all, etc).
Antialiasing and motion blur do add a fair amount to the render time -- antialiasing will use significantly more memory, and requires some core image filtering. Motion blur requires rendering several frames for each output frame, so using 128x motion blur will require 128 times as many frames to be rendered (taking about 128 times longer).
We also use the software renderer for consistency -- this makes it a bit slower, but guards the movies from all the various GPU render quirks that exist out there (however, the core image filtering stuff for Antialiasing/motion blur will still use the GPU, and have some quirks because of that :/)
I'm doing a job at the moment that involves a .qtz running 24/7 doing timelapse on a live video feed. That dumps out a .jpeg once a minute, but I then do an hourly video using the files - QuartzCrystalCLI works like a dream for this!
Just wanted to say thanks, and let you know that these things are in active use out there :)
it seems that the links to the documentation page are broken.
Any chance of removing the 2K output frame limitation ... urgently? I'm hoping to create a 3840x1080 movie, using a Matrox dualhead2go to drive 2 HD displays.
done. use the command line app (it's in the QCrystal bundle), which has no such limitation (the caveat being that you can create invalid contexts, which will then fail if you crank up AA).
I'm trying to get this going. I'm hopeful it will get around the hardware limitation on Apples Image Printer plugin (developer sample code) on pixel dimensions.
So far I have had a crash (1st attempt using 1024x940, I think) with malaloc errors etcetc and the other times it seems to do something for half a minute but the I can't find any resultant files. Any hints?
I would look at the OpenGL Info patch and see what it lists as max texture/render size. That may help at least see if to 1024x940 crash is expected...
...that seems pretty lo-rez to be triggering a crash though. I've had a handful of compositions that are problematic running at larger sizes though.... some intense pixel shader stuff comes to mind.
Hello,
For some reason my self written plugins are not loaded. In the console it says:
QuartzCrystal[23206] ***: Patch with name "QCPlugInPatch:GeneratorPlugIn" is missing
What does it mean? What should I do? The plugin is at "~/Library/Graphics/Quartz\ Composer\ Plug-Ins/" and it runs fine in Quartz Composer.
Thanks and regards, Sebastian Mecklenburg