No 1. Performance. I have done tests and often there is a severe drop in framerate for qtz files in Modul8 compared to the framerate in the Quartz Composer editor.

No 2. You cannot decide the rendering size of .qtz files in Modul8 (in version 2.5). They are always rendered as 640×480. In Modul8 v2.6 you can set the size in Preferences but there may be many situations where you’d like to set the size for the individual files.

No 3. You cannot set the duration of .qtz files in Modul8. Duration will always be 30 sec.

I find that these problems can be solved by following the steps below and converting the .qtz file to a .mov before importing it into Modul8.

If you have Quicktime Pro (as you should – it’s sort of a vj’s swiss army knife) just

1 – open your qtz file with Quicktime pro. Then
2 – resize the viewer window to your desired size. You can hit cmd+I to view the current size in the inspector.
3 – Save the file as a .mov using ‘Save as’ where you have the option to set another duration eg. 60 sec.

Now you can open the mov file in Modul8 and it will have the size and duration you want plus in many cases the framerate will improve. Note that even though the file is called .mov it is still a Quartz composition. It’s just been wrapped in a Quicktime packaging.

Also note that if the size is too big you won’t gain better performance even if you scale it down inside Modul8. You’ll have to scale down the mov file in Quicktime until you find a size that works.

Hope this works for you

I don’t know the reason for this so I don’t know if it’s a general problem or something that is limited to my OS/hardware combination. I’m running Snow Leopard on a 2.4 GHz duo core Macbook Pro.

So if you’re curious here are the files that I’ve tested with. I get approx. 14 fps with the .qtz but 57 fps with the .mov in Modul8. In Quartz Composer editor I also get around 57 fps.

particleleaves 6 (mov)

particleleaves 6 (qtz)

1. You need a Quicktime Pro license, which is a paid upgrade to the free Quicktime Player. Get it – it’s useful every day when you work with motion graphics.

2. Open the qtz file in Quicktime Pro.

3. Hit ‘Save as’ and set the duration you want for the final movie. Now the file has been saved as a .mov file, but we’re not done. The file is still basically just a .qtz file in a Quicktime packaging.

Step 3

4. Open the new .mov file in Quicktime (if it has not automatically opened in a window already)

5. Hit cmd+J to display the movie properties

6. Click on the second line where it says Quartz composer track.

7. Click on the Visual settings tab

8. Now set the fields next to ’scaled size’ to your desired size.

Step 8

9. Hit cmd+E for ‘Export’ and select to export as ‘Movie to Quicktime Movie’

Step 9

10. Click ‘Options’ and then ‘Settings’ to select an encoding format. Eg. PhotoJPEG 25 fps Color High Quality

Step 10

Voila you have a movie….

PS: Try in step 8 to set the size to x2 the size you want. Then in Settings in step 10. set the actual size of the final movie. This will help antialiasing e.g making sharp edges appear smoother. If you have serious antialiasing issues you could go for an extreme size like x8 though this will of course drastically increase the time it takes to render.