In today’s gig, I was asked to put on some basic text on screen for audiences to see, in a surprise I realised that both built in text sources are not working at all or I just have no idea on how to use them? I’m sure in VDMX5, when a media bin executes a text source to a layer, in the layer source we could see some text configuration options. Nothing showed up in VDMX6 Plus, and when viewing them in “files” under workspace inspector, I could see those options, but I could not edit any of them. Just wondering if this is a bug, or if texts have changed completely in VDMX6 in how they work?
P.S: I ended up creating a text image in photoshop and playing that through a layer to show the text I want. However this seem quite inefficient in just outputting a few simple words. Was wondering if we could get this to work within VDMX6 Plus somehow.
If it’s a permissions / privacy thing, does VDMX have full disk access and/or files and folders (could be that your systems restrictions are not allowing VDMX to access your fonts.
Strange!? Are you running VDMX6 Plus under Rosetta 2?
Any chance you could capture a screen recording of this? Based on the image it looks like you haven’t set a source layer. A video (followed up with a bug repot) would help show what’s happening!
I’ve uploaded a video of a screen recording explaining the bug. Here’s the link:
I’m 99.9% sure it’s running natively and not on Rosetta 2. It’s not that a layer source is not set, the bug is that nothing shows up in the layer source when I trigger the text media in the media bin.
Thank you for sharing. It most likely won’t change anything, but there is a newer build of VDMX6 available on the forums with some updates: VDMX6 1.0.3 Update
Also in your VDMX6 Preferences, have you changed what the default assets directory is for the application?
In the Help menu is an option to show the folder that contains various resources including the qcTextSources folder. Can you go there and confirm this folder exists?
Do you happen to have VDMX5 installed on the same computer right now? If so, can you check to see if text sources are working as expected for you there? If not, you can download that installer (http://vidvox.net/download/vdmx5) and give it a try.
I think I’ve found the problem. Under “Rendering” in Settings, I’ve disabled all QC content. My guess is text uses QC? Once I reenabled it, I could see the “Text Styles” under “Files” in settings, and text is now working!
While we’re on the topic of text, I’d like a feature request for the basic “Block Text” style. Sometimes I’d like to just quickly add an announcer text on screen for patrons, so an easy way for basic text to appear. “Block Text” style works perfectly for this, also with the ability to change font. The only downside is I can’t change its colour. Colour can only be changed for “Beat Text”, but that style’s text keeps moving around to a bpm. Is it possible to add a font colour option for “Block Text”? That would make things much easier. Unless if there are other easy ways that I do not know of, then I’m open for lessons/suggestions.
I first tried to add text via the “Built In Source”; where it does not indicate that these are Quartz Compositions. This failed silently, giving me no indication of why or what to look for. I went to tutorials and then the forums to find a solution.
Plus 1 on @RootNotez’s concern. Is there a way to offer text rendering within VDMX that doesn’t rely on Quartz patches? It seems Apple is moving on from Quartz Composer…
We’re going to make a little blog post about this soon, tl;dr…
We were hoping that Quartz Composer was going to be usable for another year / through another major release cycle, but as it is now, it looks like it doesn’t play as nice with Metal as expected, so swapping the major QC related functionality that people used with alternatives is currently at the top of our priority list. We know that text rendering support is one of the biggest pain points here. We’re looking at a few alternatives here, there’s a bit of r&d here before we commit to one path as we’d like to avoid running into this situation again in the future.
Along with text rendering, we have a laundry list of other similar things to tackle next. For the VDMX6 1.0.7 update we included our own built-in Metal based Rutt Etra FX, so people won’t have to install the v002 plugins / run in Rosetta anymore to make use of that classic. Please help us test that! And please feel free to send us emails with any other things you used QC heavily for in VDMX so we can make sure to keep them in mind.
Beyond that, we won’t be fully removing QC until absolutely necessary / we’ve swapped in replacement functionality, so you can re-enable it in the VDMX Preferences > Rendering if needed.
