[ANSWERED] Beginner Question: What are the Core Video and Quartz Composer Plugins?
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I am new to Isadora pretty much...what are the Core Video and Quartz plugins?
I guess you have to convert them to use them? Are there any tutorials about this?
steve -
It would help to know what version of Isadora you are using and what computer system you are running. It sounds like properties of Mac version that have now been superseded but more details about what you are working with would be helpful for the tech team.
Best wishes
Russell
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@stevex said:
I am new to Isadora pretty much...what are the Core Video and Quartz plugins?
There is not really any documentation on this.
The Core Video plugins were plugins first offered by Apple over 15 years ago with MacOS 10.4. They allowed faster real-time video processing because they took advantage of your computer's graphics card (GPU). Isadora adopted these plugins in the days of Isadora v1.x when most video in the program was processed on the CPU. They are somewhat difficult to work with because everything is specified as pixels instead of the more friendly percentages used by Isadora's plugins. At this point, most of effect and other features these plugins offer have been covered by Isadora's native GPU plugins, though there are probably still a few plugins that remain unique and interesting for Isadora users. Apple has not marked these plugins as deprecated, so you can expect them to be around for at least a few more years.
You can find some document on the CI plugins in this Apple legacy document, the Core Image Filter Reference.
Quartz Composer plugins were created in Apple's Quartz Composer app, a node-based visual programming language provided as part of the Xcode development environment that allowed processing and rendering graphical data. Like the Core Video plugins, Isadora offers the possibility of using Quartz Composer plugins late in the days of Isadora v1.x.
Many end-users created plugins for Quartz Composer and shared them on the Internet. Here you may find some "gems", though some of those like the Datamosh plugin require a 32-bit compatibility which stopped with macOS Mojave.
Development stopped on Quartz Composer about seven years ago. As of macOS 10.15 Catalina, the Quartz Composer framework has been deprecated, although it is still present for compatibility. However, when Apple says something is deprecated they mean it: Quartz Composer plugin support will be removed for some future version of macOS. Because of this, we do not recommend that you continue using Quartz Composer plugins in patches that need to have any sort of longevity.
Because these plugins are not cross platform, and because they are not really developed by Apple any longer, we've stopped doing extensive testing on these two plugin categories; we have kept them around so that legacy patches that still use can still be run. We recommend that you work with Isadora's GPU based actors and/or GLSL plugins that we expect will work for many years to come.
I hope that helps!
Best Wishes,
Mark
