In the hunt for a leaner meaner faster booting mac i decided to disable spotlight last week. I use quicksilver for launching apps so it seemed like a good idea...

However I have now discovered that both time machine and finders search rely on it, so not really sure if its worth it... might just do it before each gig...

here's how to do it on leopard but to edit those files open them with a text editor not the default browsery thing... but be careful! This is not like free online bingo where things are straight forward and simple.

When precomping a bit of animation for a larger comp, eg creating a logo rotation etc, when you bring it in and want it to loop:

rick-click Time>enable Time remapping

then alt/opt click the stop watch to enter the expression
loopOut("cycle");

slide the coloured layer handle as long as you want it to loop and bob's yer da.

have been melting my head on ae expressions all night trying to get something that will "move to the beat"

Math.sin(time*7);

is about right it seems, and then you mulitply that by what ever you need the unilt to be, ie if you want a solid to flash to the beat, stick that expresion on its opacity with an extra times 100 on the end:

Math.sin(time*7)*100;

Thanks to Mr Gifford and Mr Ebbert for their helpful sites...

If you cant view it above try vimeo or

More building blocks for making you a quartz genius with no technical knowledge, this lesson covers controller objects of get your 3d stuff groovin to that music. Check it.

Just a quickie for anyone wishing to use audio from itunes to drive their VDMX audio effects whilst practicing.

You can of course just play the audio out your speakers and use the internal mic (assuming you have one) to pick it up, but this gives a pretty ugly wave form...

So using sound flower (free from cyling 74) and the sound pref pane on your mac and VDMX's audio analyser plugin this is how i sorted it:

with audio running in itunes coming out your speakers as normal:

1. in system preferances, sound pane, output tab, select soundflower 2ch

>>itunes goes quiet, ie the sound is no longer coming out the speakers

2. in vdmx set, click options on audio analyser, input drop down: soundflower 2ch

>>audio analyser displays music waveform but still no sound coming from speakers

3. still in audio analyser check "play thru" is to build in output (its like this by default)

>> still no sound from speakers

4. launch soundflower bed(the wee app that comes with sound flower and select bulit in output on the 2 channel options (default is none)

>> sound now comes through speakers :)

Quartz compositions can be combined with any vj software or even used on their own, but VDMX offers the opportunity to manipulate the parameters of your quartz files live during you set. here's how...

>Lesson 2 from shakinda and Vimeo.

Ok so you wanna learn how to rock the world with quartz, lets kick off with some basic and the cube

Lesson 1 from shakinda and Vimeo.

Quartz composer is one of the best and most underused vj tools. So here to try and make it a bit more accessible is the first in my series of tutorials: Lesson 0 why quartz.

The first set of tutorials will be on quartz on tiger moving on to leopard when the basics have been covered. Hopefully these will spark some discussion so if you have better way of doing anything Im covering please comment.

Lesson 0 from shakinda and Vimeo.