Check out Conduit

Posted on July 19, 2006 by Colin McFadden

Anyone who’s into compositing should check out Conduit, a new plugin for Motion from dvGarage (which is essentially the PixelCorps). It adds nodal compositing to Motion, so that you can do Shake-style node trees to build your composite, but take advantage of Motion’s realtime playback. The interface is well done, if not entirely HIG-complient.

In any case, if you’re at all interested in high-end compositing, this is a great way to jump in. While the cost is less of an issue now that Shake is only $499, the interface of Conduit is much less overwhelming, so you can focus on wrapping your brain around nodal composites instead of learning an antiquated interface.

One imagines that whatever product succeeds Shake will be very similar to this.

Compressor Bug

Posted on July 12, 2006 by Colin McFadden

Just when I thought I wouldn’t have anything to blog about, I find a bug in Compressor. Hoorah!

Step 1:

Make a cluster. Doesn’t have to include other machines, but it has to be a real cluster, created in QAdministrator. Read the docs if you don’t know how to get this far.

Step 2:

Submit a job to the cluster using the Compressor 2.1 “Video for iPod” preset.

Step 3:

Listen to the silence of your missing audio track!

Audio track is fine if you submit it to “This Computer” but disappears as soon as you submit it to a real cluster. Tested on an xServe, an iMac and a Macbook.

Fun!

As a minor aside though, if you want to run jobs simultaneously in Compressor (which Apple says can’t be done) take a look at the qmasterprefs command line program. Particularly this bit (using qmasterprefs -list):

-service “Compressor Processing” on instances 1 autorestart off unmanaged off

Changes the instances to whatever you want, rebuild your cluster and marvel at the simultaneous processing!