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...

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.