resolution in msg

[Donna Kuhn]

i am trying to place all the resolution independent presets in a separate folder and i was wondering about resolution--if i open up the processor window, if a preset has one or more indep res components, but then lots of those that aren't, is the preset still indep res. i was confused about one in particular, sketch1fsa--it says it is res indep in the msg documentation but in the proc chain window it doesn't. i am using the isight and it seems to really need the res indep effects to look halfway decent. thanks--

[Synthetik]

Any of the FSA processors are resolution independent. The FSA processing is something unique we developed at Synthetik to try and address resolution independent issues with processing. With a normal blur filter for example, as the resolution increased, you would need to increase the filter kernel size accordingly to get the same visual effect that is at the increased resolution. Otherwise, things would not seem as blurred in the higher resolution image if you used the original fixed size filter kernel.

Many MSG processors specify the processing extent as a percent of the dimensions of the image as a way to get around this problem. So the effect will scale with this approach for the same set of internal editable parameters. However, the time required for the processing goes up as the resolution increases. FSA processors are unique in that the processing time for the effect doesn't change as you change the kernel size. A super blur with a really large kernel size takes no more time than a small amount of blur. There are FSA processors to build things like resolution independent gradients.

If there seems to be a radically different appearance of the small msg preview image and the larger msg canvas image, then the effect is not resolution independent. That's the quick way to check it.

[Donna Kuhn]

can you add a fsa to any preset to make it res. indep?

[Synthetik]

If there was a FSA equivalent of a particular processor, you could swap that in instead. So instead of using an ISEFBlurFilter for example, you could use a 1ToFloatSumArea and 1BlurFloatSumArea combination to do a resolution independent blur instead.

But only some processors would have FSA equivalents. It's really just blurs, gradients, and orientation calculations and things built out of combinations of those things. The original implementations of those effects were very dependent on resolution, so that's why we developed the FSA equivalents.

There are a large number of MSg processors that are resolution independent but are not FSA processors. Something like RGB_MaxArea for example is not FSA based, but it does generate a resolution independent effect because the Spatial Area parameter is specified as a percentage of the total image size.