Recording a demo reel from a Quartz Composer composition or other video generator to share online

It kind of goes without saying that these days, posting your work online is a great way to promote yourself as a VJ or creative coder, and to make new contacts for future collaborations. Along with a studio or live mix of your visual work, including some of the original resources that were used during the making of your process for other people to learn from is another way to make your mark on the community. 

For this technique tutorial we'll be looking at recording a demo reel that shows off the different ways that your generative compositions can be used in a live setting by using different sets of control data to drive its parameters, such as time based LFOs, MIDI / OSC control, and audio analysis data-source providers. Once we've finished creating the sample movie, we'll also walk through how to share the files using the videopong.net website where they can be hosted, downloaded and remixed by other video artists for free.

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Bar graph visualizations with Quartz Composer and VDMX

Among the many uses of Quartz Composer, and perhaps one that is often overlooked, is the ability to make visualizations of data and other information. Since the compositions are rendered in realtime, when creating them for this purpose it can be helpful to make the patches reusable with published input values for use in other environments, or replicating within QC itself.

In this two part video tutorial we'll first create a composition in Quartz Composer that renders a simple bar graph data visualization with inputs for changing its labels and values that can be used in other applications. Once the patch is completed it can be loaded into VDMX and set up to respond to a variety of different inputs as a visualizer of tempo or audio levels as part of a VJ set, an on screen display of MIDI / DMX channels, or any other arbitrary data that you can get into your computer by OSC.

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