I'm still a total newbie so I'm not trying to change world quite yet, but I want to know the big picture so I can maintain focus as I figure out the basics. My goal right now is to get a full screen output of live video. So, it's just a full screen preview. After that, I'd like to make use of the new core image filters and see if I can do some real time effects using the hardware accelerated effects.

Here's my wild guess:
I'm guessing that the video is going to come in through sequence grabber component, have that become an openGL texture at some point, project that to a plane in OpenGL, and wala I see it on screen. Is this the basic picture? I've read a bunch of tutorials and documentations but they're too detailed and I can't put together the "big" picture..

I'm not at all clear on how I'd apply the core image filters. Once the incoming video frames are OpenGL textures, do I just feed them to a set of filtering methods? Not really sure how all this stuff integrates together.

So nevermind the details, can anyone show me the big picture?

apple has sample code of applying coreimage filters to quicktime video, I suggest you start there.

to get this straight... forget live video input for now. I'm trying to start a project that loads a bitmap, does raster pixel crunching type effects, and then throws that on the screen.

So, how would a knowledgable cocoa programmer take this apart? I'm still having problems understanding what part is best for what.. Ok, from what I know, OpenGL is good for putting things on screen, so everything will happen under OpenGL. To get access to individual pixels, I use a coreimage context, yes? So, my basic understanding is that I do all the pixel calculations and effects within coreimage, and then send it to openGL to display or buffer the output. Sound just about right? Or is coreimage solely a required context to gain access to the coreimage filters?