Mixxa Effects

This is a sub-page of the Mixxa main page.

Blackedit

Solid black image with alpha = 1, at the standard resolution defined in the Setup dialog.

Blend - 35 ways of blending images togetheredit

Two cells are mixed. The incoming video streams are the small icons above the cross-fader. The cross-fader mixes between the first input (cross-fader left), the blend, and the second input (cross-fader right).

The blend effect is determined by clicking the blend type name at the bottom, which brings up a new "blend type" window. Select one of 35 blend types. Rolling over a blend name lets you preview the effect without changing the output of the cell.

In the blend type window, some blend types are divided into two halves. The right side is the same as the left, but the right swaps the two inputs to the mix effect. The 12 or 21 button also swaps the two inputs to the mix effect. For some effects, A blend B is different than B blend A (like Hard Light).

Tip: To smoothly change to the right image, move the cross-fader to the left, switch the right image to something else, then bring the cross-fader to the middle or right.

Tip: This blend effect is built into many of the other effect types, which allows for the effect type to be mixed with its un-modified input.

Some blend types are:

• A Over B (uses the alpha transparency of A)
• A Inside B (uses the alpha transparency of B)
• A Screen B (the brighter B is, the more of it is added to A)
• A Multiply B
• A Light = Max B
• A Add B
• A Luma Diff B (uses the hue and saturation of A, and the luminance difference between A and B)
• A Difference B (takes the difference between each of red, green and blue of the two images)
• A Displace B (uses luminance of A to warp B)

Blur - uniform or partial blursedit

It can do a uniform blur, or, when the second input is wired in, blur is based on a greyscale image (the second input).

Cell Fetch - Get the Output of Any Celledit

This is how you get image streams from other Matrixes. Gets the output of any cell given the matrix, column and row of a cell.

Clouds - fly-through infinite cloud loopedit

Zoom and rotate camera in any direction as you fly-through clouds.

Color Push - push color out of an imageedit

Color Push can help so your audience doesn’t need to be treated for Color Overload. Or you can treat them WITH more Color Overload. Depending on the subtle-ness of your style, you can reduce the color palette here by reducing the hue range of your image.

Corner Pin move 4 corners of imageedit

Deke - random start, turn, stop navigation over imageedit

Like a football payer.

Drift - scroll over repeating imageedit

19.

Drift takes its input and continuously slide and repeat the image. Zero resets the motion. You can mirror (19a) the image, and like in Zoom, soften the edges for seamless repeating (19b).

Edge - enhance edgesedit

Edge can add transparency and a colored edge line. Click/drag on the image (16a) to blend the edge effect with the original image. The slider (16b) sets a contrast threshold. (16c) makes the edge wider. The edge color is set on the right (17a).

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Extract - crop imageedit

Use 4 points to crop an image.

Feather - soften edges of an imageedit

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Feather can crop the image (18a), then scale (18b), move (18c) and rotate (18d) it.

Feedback - mix and transform image from another celledit

Feedback was added to keep Jim Ellis off the street. It feeds another cell of the matrix, often the last cell of the column, back into itself.

The left column chooses the source of the feedback (which is delayed a frame). You can use the outputs of itself (me) or one of the columns 1 to 9. Then by clicking on the preview image of Feedback (20a), you blend the incoming image with the feedback image. Other sliders control zoom (21a) (21b), rotate (21c) and translate (21d). Hit R to reset it all.

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Film - fake film effectedit

A bunch of arbitrary effects combined to fake film.

Finger Paintedit

This is barely a paint system. You can draw some paint strokes. Click-drag your finger/mouse around the inner window. Designed for drunk VJs to harass his/her crowd with stream-of-consciousness or public service announcements.

• • You can later adjust the one (of 64 million possible) color, line softness and line width.
  • The Paint window has an Undo button that deletes the most recent paint stroke.
  • Undo one stroke, and Clear all strokes.
  • Output an image to bin 8 (Finger Paint) by pressing Save, Change the output bin in Setup.
  • Pressing Paint at the bottom is a shortcut to the floating paint window. You can resize it to get a bigger canvas.

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Fizzle - move pixels randomlyedit

Random displacements on image pixels.

Key Fade - luminance keyedit

Low-high luminance keyer followed by a brightness fader. Almost same as Luma Key but it has a fine-control on the brightness for low-level adjustments.

Level - black level, gamma, brightnessedit

Black level, gamma, brightness fader.

The fader (29a) dims the background image, (29b) dims or boosts the projected image and lets you fade to black while you prepare your next assault and your audience adjusts its eyes to a black screen. (29c) adjust black level of the output. (29d) adjust gamma of the video. Use its reset (R) button to get back to normal.

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Luma Key - luminance keyedit

Two sliders specify low-high levels of a luminance key (22b). Raising the lower slider cuts out darks and you can see through to the checkerboard background. The other slider cuts out the brights. It’s transparent where you see checkerboard.

Almost same as Key Fade.

Matte - use a grey-scale image to mix two imagesedit

Three inputs. The first two are two images, and the third is the matte. Where the matte is dark you see the first image. Where the matte is bright you see the second image. It is the matte luminance that is used.

Mod - monochrome, key, blur, brightnessedit

15.

The first slider (15a) is monochrome, the second is (15b) is black level. Move the slider below 0 to add white.

(15c) and (15d) give a luminance key, where you set the lower and upper luminance range (generating a matte (“alpha”) as well) that is passed to the next stage. You see previews of both RGB and alpha.

(15e) and (15f) adjust blur and brightness (The brightness slider set at 50% means normal brightness).

Movie Play - play movie files and stillsedit

This is the most important effect, which brings movies from the bins into the matrix. See TouchMixer (Mixxa2015)#Movie Play effect.

Net Stream - receiving video from another TouchDesigner computeredit

You can receive video from another TouchDesigner process with a Net Stream effect type. Give it the name or IP address of the remote computer, and make sure you can reach the other computer using Windows networking, in both directions. Use the port number of 9000 for linking 2 computers 2-way. Use 9000, 9001 and 9002 if you want bi-directional traffic on 3 computers.

To output the video stream to another Mixxa, go to Setup and click on “output port 9000”.

Historic: You can also take a video stream from TouchMixer 017 on another computer, running over Gigabit Ethernet over port 9000 or 9001. On your computer running Touch 017, first set the environment variable VTOUCHOUT to “1 512 256 4 3 30”, which sets it up to output a stream at 512x256 (res from TouchMixer has to be powers of 2), aspect ratio 4x3 and attempting to run at 30 frames per second. 1 at the start means on, 0 means off. That’s via right-click on My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced Settings ->

Null - pass-throughedit

A pass-through or place-holder.

Outs - ignoreedit

Don't bother with this. Luma Key or Key Fade is enough.

Patch - rearrange an imageedit

Samples circular chunks of the input image and places them randomly scaled, moved and rotated. There is size, spread and softening control.

Perlin Noise - blobby texturesedit

A smooth noise field with color, density, movement controls.

Repeateredit

Gestured circles, triangles repeated in trails.

Sample - retain last sequence of images and repeat loopedit

( Expert: Sample (12a) (sample-and-loop) is used to capture in memory the video stream passing through it, letting you loop a captured sample that is up to about 3 seconds. It lets you capture, loop, delay or time-blur the video going through it.)

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( Expert: Thru just passes the video through, unchanged. Delay delays the input by up to 64 frames (actual time depends on your frames per second). Timeblur smears video over time, up to 40 images (Warning: It can be slow). Using Sample and Loop, you can capture a short loop from a source like a video camera. Caution: These can take a lot of graphics card RAM.)

( Expert: Sample grabs the most recent 40 images of the video while still passing the source through. When you press Loop, it loops some part of that 40 images. You select the end of the loop by pressing on the horizontal slider with the red time bar. You can select how fast it plays via the slider to the left of the preview window. And you can select how many beats it loops to by pressing 1, 2, 4 or 8. When you use Sample, Delay or Timeblur, it can be a bit of a graphics memory hog (xres * yres * 4 * 40 = bytes of graphics RAM).

Search - does a web search for images and you can select from the resultsedit

Put in some keywords and a search is made for images tagged similarly. Pick one and combine it with the incoming image.

Still Cut - crop a high-res image and navigate around itedit

Still Cut is a very powerful hi-res image cropper, with random drifts over the image.

It reads the image from disk at its native resolution, then crops out a part at the compositing resolution of Mixxa. (See Setup. This preserves the detail as much as possible and allows zooming into sections of the image.)

Then you can manually/randomly make the rectangle drift over the original image.

Assign the image for Still Cut via the bins as you would with the Movie Play effect.

To determine the rectangle that it extracts, it applies zoom, rotate, center, drift on/off, random translate, random rotate, feather edges.

The controls can be lagged with the last slider.

SUPER-TIP: Make the crop window randomly drift and turn via the sliders on the right. The heading slider will may the crop rectangle to turn in the direction the rectangle is going.

The source image can just as well be a movie.

Stoner - Warp Images with a Mesh of Control Pointsedit

Stoner is useful for fitting rectangular images onto curves surfaces in projections, or generally warping an image. It starts as a 3x3 grid of points and subdivides 4x between control points. You can add rows and columns up to a grid of 9x9, and within each pair of rows or columns, subdivide up to 32.

Stoner is formerly a 4-point keystoner, now a 9x9 patch editor to warp images.

Text Pattern - random patterns with fontsedit

This is a strange single-character generator that uses the Symbol font to generate close-ups of simple shapes.

Tile - simple tiling of imageedit

Some simple tiling patterns. See also Patch and Zoom.

Time Jitter - re-order sequence of images randomlyedit

Frames of video are time-re-ordered.

Video In - Direct Show video devices and camerasedit

This is video from cameras, video devices, webcam - devices supported through Direct Show and Image Source.

Select a camera number (33a) or click on the image (33b) if the camera plugged into your computer isn’t visible here. One camera is the default, but you can add more by right-click -> Duplicate on the bin button for the camera. You can unplug cameras and plug them back in and they get picked up, without a pause.

33. 34.

Wordsedit

Click on one of the text (32a) in the preparation window (not the movie icon), type text, press backspace or Delete. Sliders adjust size and color. You can set background color. Delete the text to get a simple color slate. Enter \n to add a newline.

Xform 3D - wrap image on simple 3D shapesedit

The incoming image is mapped on some 3D shapes with simple camera controls.

Zoom - zoom, rotate into image, feather and tileedit

Each layer feeds through Zoom. The first slider of Zoom (13a) sets the Zoom amount. Then if you press on the preview image, it scrolls the image and sets the center point for rotations of the image. (13b) sets its rotation. (13c) repeats the image horizontally and vertically. Mirr (14a) gives a mirrored kaleidoscope look.

( Expert: (14b) sets an edge softness for seamless repeats. (14c) sets the lag time of your zooms, pans and rotates, and you can drag this slider off-scale to give you long sweeps when you operate Zoom’s other controls.)

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