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March 08, 2005
Apple article on new CoreImage tools
Apple has posted an article on their developer site discussing the new CoreImage features of Tiger, including a preview of the two CI tools I've been playing with a lot but couldn't discuss before.
First of all, read the article.
Quartz Composer is the one I've been using the most, you can see a screenshot of it at the bottom of the article. You hook up component pipelines with a GUI and then save them as compositions, which can be loaded by applications or turned into screen savers. This makes the creation of motion graphics pretty simple, and it's a good way to prototype advanced image/video features in an app without having to write all the code up front. I'm using it to create video transitions to be used for a video markup app. I had wanted to do this with Panther, but there was too many manual things to keep track of, it wasn't possible to get something working quickly before Tiger came along. There's going to be a huge bloom of video/graphics apps once Tiger is available to the entire Mac community.
Like the article says, CoreVideo is a bridge between Quicktime and Quartz. There's a nice CoreVideo pipeline where you can apply sub-pipelines of ImageUnits to your video, and then the frames are rendered onto the screen using OpenGL. It's much faster than the QT6 method. Drawing text on top of a video frame in realtime with QT6 made my powerbook yelp in pain, it didn't have a lot of cpu time left over after that. With CoreVideo, I've got plenty of juice left. Apple is still being vague about CoreVideo and QT7 AFAICT, so I won't say much more about them, but there's some other really great features that make adding video to Cocoa apps much easier than before.
Like I said last week, as new OS releases come out, Apple keeps peeling back layers of the OS and giving developers high-level APIs that give us access to lower-level features. They've done an excellent job with the design of their classes, you can tell how much thought went into it. Whenever I speculate about what sort of features OS X.5 and X.6 will have, I get a happiness stroke. It is very difficult to not sound like a fanboy when working with their software, it is the best of all worlds for me. My background is enterprise services and storage systems, so Unix is a dear old friend of mine. I love having a Unix-based OS with a commercial force behind it, there's no way Linux can catch up. The Linux fanboys trash Apple for having expensive hardware, but I gladly pay the premium prices in order to get a true multimedia Unix OS plus functional and beautiful hardware. I understand the principle behind their stance, but will let them use their antiquated APIs and commodity hardware while I develop video/audio apps and live out here on the bleeding edge of technology. :-)
Posted by djb at March 8, 2005 09:26 AM