I've always wondered (well at least since Quartz Composer 3.0 was released with Leopard) the performance difference between using the new and much easier to use Math Expression patch, and the old Math patch - and in fact compared to using JavaScript.

So I created the attached test composition and found some surprising results (at least I found them surprising, though in retrospect I can understand why :P).

First of all, all 3 methods are pretty quick, and are unlikely to be a bottleneck. Unless you are using the operations in an Iterator patch with a lot of iterations you won't notice any difference.

The figures below are for 2nd gen 2.33Ghz Macbook Pro:

Quartz Composer is a great piece of software for many things. It has a lot of features which really allow you to create amazing things very quickly. It also has some 'features' which allow you to lose your hair very quickly. One of these 'features' is loading images from within an iterator.

You'd think it was quite straightforward, just send a different string (either generated within the iterator or loaded from XML etc.) to the Image Downloader, but alas QC has other plans. It always loads the same image whatever string you send it!

The current latest version of VDMX5 (0.6.2.7) now has the brilliant (undocumented) capability of using Quartz Composer patches as plugins (in addition to clips, effects and text sources).

What you need to do is:

1. Create a Quartz Composer patch with a published input, and a published output... with JavaScript or Maths nodes inbetween.
2. Plop your QTZ in your VDMX/plugins folder
3. Create an instance of your plugin from the Plugin Manager (at the moment you need to restart VDMX for the plugin to appear I think, I'm sure this will be addressed quite soon).
4. Assign any VDMX data source to the input of your QTZ plugin.
5. Assign the ouput of your QTZ plugin as a data source to and slider.

et voila! beautiful. I've attached my sample files...

This article will start with the basic definitions of bits, bytes etc, go through how data is stored in bits and bytes, and eventually discuss how the binary and hexadecimal number systems work, how to convert between the two and decimal and how that can be useful. Lays a foundation for later articles...