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Some feature Ideas

Suggestions for new features for Magic.
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RobertFennis
Posts: 6
Joined: Fri Dec 16, 2016 10:36 am

Some feature Ideas

Post by RobertFennis »

Hi everybody!

I recently bought this software and I absolutely fucking love it! Its super easy to use and it runs perfectly. After a very lengthy experience with photoshop, there were some features I'd like to see happening!

1. A colour balance feature. Similar to Photoshop, a slider that can displace the amounts of red, blue, green, cyan, yellow and magenta in the shadows midtones and highlights separately
2. A gaussian blur feature
3. A circle geometry
4. The 'resonant displacer'. This a feature I invented. It treats an object in one dimension as a string and displaces it in the orthogonal direction. So basically if you have a horizontal line, it will displace it up and down. However, it will do so based on resonant frequencies and harmonics. The displacement will be as sinusoidial functions. So if the screen goes from x=0 to x=1, the function of y displacement will be: y= sum( An*B*sin(n*2pi*x)). The fundamental frequency can be chosen at will for example 100Hz. B is a constant that can be set by the user to be anything. The An constants will be Fourier components of the song (basically, the amplitude of the presence of those frequencies in the music at any time) and so will the the overtones (200Hz, 300Hz and 400Hz etc). This will possibly give a very cool displacement of a shape that responds to music very realistically and lifelike. It should also be easy to implement. This features should also operate in polar coordinates so you can inflate blobs (spheres) under certain angles instead of x values.
5. Beatfinder to synchronize scene switches. This would allow the software to let you change between scenes triggered by the music.
6. An exposure feature that allows colours to bleed to neighboring colours. So if this value is increased beyond 0 and you have a screen that only consists of green values, once this exposure value is increased to a point where green is maxed, neighbouring colours red and blue will also be increased which creates a more realistic 'glow' to the picture.
7. The curves and levels window that also exists in photoshop. I couldn't necessarily see how audio sensitivity would come in here but they are still vital tools to adjust brightness values of your window.
8. fluent transitions between scenes.

Maybe some of these features already exist but yeah, I thought, lets throw them out. :)
Sadler
Posts: 1139
Joined: Sat Aug 02, 2014 7:10 pm
Location: London, UK

Re: Some feature Ideas

Post by Sadler »

1. Colour balance: IMHO Hi/Mid/Shadow balance is clearly in the realms of photography and videography for correcting before you get to magic.
2. Gaussian might be too expensive for real time.
3. The polygon object can approximate a circle.
4. I think I'd have to see a picture ;)
5. There's not much out there to reliably analyse BPM in real time (waveclock) but some tying to an internal tapped or analysed beat would be nice.
6. This is probably well into the shader territory - there may be something already out there or something that could be adapted.
7. Again, I see curves for still images (have you ever tried to apply curves to video?) so not really appropriate (IMHO) for real time reactive graphics.
8. Playlist window? Multimix module?
artnik
Posts: 268
Joined: Tue Jan 05, 2016 5:33 pm

Re: Some feature Ideas

Post by artnik »

Hello Robert!

If you're new to this software, I expect you may also be new to Vj'ing apps in general. Sadler makes some good points, but a lot of the functionality you're looking for, or very similar, is most likely going to be found in ISF or GLSL shaders, before it makes it into the core app.

A while back I posted an organized library of shaders I've been collecting. You can find it here: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=857&p=3755 It's a good start for additional functionality. Check the manual for how to add modules to the app, or how to get Magic to look additional folders for modules. (https://magicmusicvisuals.com/downloads ... uleFolders)

A lot of ISF shaders are posted at: http://www.interactiveshaderformat.com, which is where a lot of the files in that library came from.

You can always write your own shaders. :-) Learning to modify and write shaders is not too difficult. That interactiveshaderformat.com site allows you to edit the code in realtime and see the results as you work. I started from scratch only this year and already feel confident to modify shaders reliably.

Lastly, if you see something you like on this site: http://www.shadertoy.com, a lot of them can be converted automatically with this script: https://magicmusicvisuals.com/utils/sha ... to_isf.php simply by copying and pasting the unique ID from Shadertoy.

The resulting code can simply be pasted into the editor on http://www.interactiveshaderformat.com. (One thing to note, the script isn't perfect, and you may need to remove a comma from the header in the shader code, as the script assumes there will be a list of inputs, and not just one, and the comma separates definitions in the header for the interface elements. i.e. the final definied input should not have a comma after the curly bracket).
RobertFennis
Posts: 6
Joined: Fri Dec 16, 2016 10:36 am

Re: Some feature Ideas

Post by RobertFennis »

Hey guys, thanks for the response, I'll look into that. I'm fairly new. I have a bunch of knowledge from other areas but V'J-ing is new to me indeed.
skarabee
Posts: 130
Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2015 3:11 am

Re: Some feature Ideas

Post by skarabee »

I really like the number 4) "resonant displacer"
I'm currently working in MMV with midi and building visual intruments combining 2D and 3D. I tried to build a resonant string for a harp-like visual, but the result is not perfect, it's a fake vibration produced by sine wave lfo. With your method, how will react the line? Vibrating up and down all along the length, or max at the center and zero on each end (or nodes)?
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