slow down MSG animation

[Dennis Miller]

I don't see any TGs in this MSG preset so I don't know how to slow down the animation it produces - tried changing (lowering) the few existing parameters, but it is a no go. I want to use this MSG preset to process a movie in SA, but I need to find a way to make the chnages it produces much slower (by half or two thirs at least.) Any clue what will produce that result? Thanks much for the help. Best, Dennis

6 big color.zip

[Synthetik]

The answer is to wait for studio artist 4.0. The 1Sketch3 msg processor doesn't have a random seed parameter in the current releases, so each time you run it you get a different random variation of the effect.

The 1Sketch3 processor does have a random seed parameter in the version 4 codebase, so running the process several times in a row with the same modulation stream inputs will give the same results. You could modulate the seed with a TG (uniform random type) if you wanted to get the old behavior with clicker every frame. But changing the seed parameter gives you another unique random variation, and that's not something you could smoothly vary. To get a slow variation you'd have to smoothly change one or both of the orient or texture input streams in some way.

[Synthetik]

Some more explanation about random seed parameters below:

Studio Artist and MSG Evolver make heavy use of internal random number generators to help create organic complexity in generated imagery. What a random number seed parameter lets you do is specify a unique set of random numbers with a single numeric value. You can think of each unique seed value as being associated with a unique series of random numbers.

So, for a msg processor like the AdvTurb processor, changing the seed parameter will create an infinite variety of unique images in the particular style specified by the the other parameter settings in the processor. This is actually a really cool feature to have since you can edit a particular style of imagery and then create an infinite variety of different images in that style by just changing one parameter, the random seed. An in fact, the ReSeed button in MSG Evolver lets you do this to all of the processors in a msg preset at the click of a button when working with the evolution grid.

Many msg processors also have internal parameters that may specify different internal algorithms for the overall effect type. Again, smoothly changing these parameters will not create a smooth change in a generated image since unique integer values of the parameter are specifying completely different internal processing variations for the overall effect style.

Keyframing random seed values in an animation doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless you want to have potentially dramatically changing images from fame to frame. It's highly unlikely that the changes will be smooth. They will be consistent with the style of the processor but on a local pixel level could be completely different from frame to frame.

The same is true for internal parameters that specify internal algorithm variations. If the parameter description in the MSG Evolver User Guide pdf says something to the effect of 'specifies the specific algorithm used for ...', then that would be one of the parameters i'm talking about. The Studio Artist interface presents those kinds of editable parameters as popup controls as opposed to slider controls, so it's easier to keep them straight in Studio Artist. We'd like to incorporate that distinction in the msg editing interface at some point in the future.

For now, the best way to get a sense of what animating a parameter value will do is to grab it's user slider and watch the display update in real time as you move it. If you see the image smoothly vary, then you know what will happen if you animate the parameter with a TG or in a keyframe. And vice versa, if you are adjusting something like a random seed parameter, you will see the display updates radically change with each movement of the slider.

There are a few msg processors that use internal random numbers that are missing a random seed parameter for the user to edit in MSG Evolver 1.0. The 1Sketch3 processor is one of those. Because there is no user editable random seed parameter, every time you run one of this limited set of processors you will create a unique image in the style specified by the other editable controls in the processor. The studio artist version 4 msg code provides user editable random seeds for this set of processors.

One approach to reduce the flicker when using something like 1Sketch3 today would be to introduce some temporal continuity in the overall processing effect that contained it. By using the msg preset containing 1Sketch3 in Studio Artist, you could build a PASeq that perhaps does some frame blending, essentially adding the newly created image to a percentage of the last output frame.