First and foremost, we'd like to get video input going, both to get an image from a camera into Max and to load prerecorded movies. As the next step, we'd like to display these images. The jit.qt.grab object allows us to grab a camera input and the jit.qt.movie object allows us to play back a movie. All Jitter objects start with jit, and to save us some typing, if we create a new Jitter object, we can just type j instead of n to create a new object with the text jit. in it. The qt term in jit.qt.grab and other objects stands for quick time, so an up-to-date quick time version is required.

In the following screenshot, you can see we used jit.qt.grab to feed in a live camera image. In the case of multiple available cameras, the help file of jit.qt.grab tells us how to query available devices and how to choose which one to use. The jit.qt.grab object is a good example of how Jitter works; we need to send in bangs to make something happen, and it outputs a...