Quartz Composer/VDMX tutorial no 1: The bouncing ball from goto10 on Vimeo.

Trying to learn Apple’s free visual patching tool Quartz Composer, useful for making your own filters and simple generative effects?

Or perhaps you’re learning VDMX, the brilliant, semi-modular Mac-friendly visual tool – which also happens to host Quartz Composer compositions as effects or generative sources?

Well, good news for you: readers have a ton of tutorials for both, thanks to some intrepid readers in comments on that fantastic-looking CONTAKT/Richie Hawtin show.

First up, Joris de Jong aka Hybrid Visuals has started a series of tutorials on VDMX and Quartz Composer – two delicious tastes put together. And he points us at some other useful tutorials, too. Some of my favorites:

Using video in Processing is, sadly, really painful. You can do absolutely wonderful things once it’s working — pixel-by-pixel manipulations that are hard to do elsewhere, and easily-coded OpenGL manipulations that should help generate powerful eye candy. But the list of issues runs something like this:

• Windows doesn’t support capture without the addition of the buggy WinVDIG, which often doesn’t work properly.
• Linux doesn’t support anything.
• Capture is slow on Mac, and sometimes doesn’t work.
• QuickTime updates regularly hose the whole setup.
• Important QuickTime features aren’t supported.
• Playback is slow.
• Playback often crashes.
• Things just don’t work, and you don’t know why.

Now, granted, for simple sketches and experimentation, the library often will work. Or at least, it works except when it doesn’t — and you can read about how often it doesn’t in the reference.

Fortunately, I think the situation could be — and soon will be — very, very different.