Quartz Composer

[Matt]

I've been really enjoying the progress of OBS on Mac so far. It's already very usable, and I am really looking forward to additional stability and features. Since my overall experience has been rather positive, I'd like to bring up a Mac-specific technology that (I believe) should not be overlooked.

Currently, I cannot find any mention of Quartz on the OBS Mac forums. If you look at Photo Booth's "Backdrop" effects (instant green screen, without the screen), you can instantly see the potential of using such a technology. And Quartz Composer would allow anyone to build a custom animation or effect; hardware accelerated, at that. Or how about music visualizers, or custom transitions between scenes?

Of course, you don't need quartz to write a custom transition… but how about writing one with a visual editor who's finished product is inherently hardware accelerated?

I'm sure OBS will leverage each platform's technologies to reach maximum potential wherever it runs, but I didn't want to see this one overlooked on the Mac. It would be wonderful to see support baked into OBS, rather than a plugin after the fact.

:)

 

[Light And Magic]

A tough feature for a multiplatform tool, but boy this would be so cool!

 

[TheMuso]

I don’t think this is needed, because there is a tool that already leverages Quartz Composer, and it can have its output fed directly into OBS.

CamTwist (http://camtwiststudio.com) uses Quartz Composer, and ships with a lot of effects ready to go out of the box. It supports Syphon, so you can send its video via Syphon over to OBs, and performance is great.

 

[Light And Magic]

Oh nice, I did use CamTwist in the past to prepare my webcam output to the stream, but because I lost performance using it with OBS I ditched it. Time to bring it back into the workflow maybe? Thanks for the suggestion.

 

[TheMuso]

If you haven't already, try using the beta of Camtwist 3. It uses the newer and more performant APIs from Mountain Lion and later, and I think it is 64-bit only now as well, which would help.

EDIT: I should add that in some circumstances it does crash, like trying to add a monitor capture and choosing the monitor you want to capture, but OBs does that already so that shouldn't be a problem.

 

[Matt]

CamTwist is a good workaround, but it's still a workaround. Of course, as a Mac user who likes streaming, workarounds are what you get used to. That said, CamTwist will have some limitations for this purpose as well.

When you use CamTwist with OBS, it will be available as one source in a scene. That also means that any Quartz effects that take place inside CamTwist are limited to that source. Therefore, if, for example, you want the entire scene to have a ripple or blur effect when you receive a new follower… this is actually impossible as only the CamTwist source will have the effect (not the entire scene). And that's if you're lucky enough to find a way to have OBS communicate to CamTwist that you have a new follower.

While OBS is still in it's very early stages of development, CamTwist is a good idea. But my original post was looking down the road at what OBS may ultimately become for the Mac. CamTwist is actually an excellent example of what OBS would be capable of. But with the added benefits of being "baked in," there are so many more possibilities.

My hope is that the idea of Quartz is both brought up early enough and that it's of enough interest that we might see it in the final stages of the Mac branch.

:)

 

[Light And Magic]

Very good arguments, Matt, and although it will be very hard to implement it all in a cross platform application I do hope the developer takes notes of this. Taking this even further, if OBS would interface with streaming services directly we would not have to rely on many 3rd party tools to know what is happening in our stream, making OBS the centre of our universe. Sweet dreams...