Magic Music Visuals

Good afternoon,
So the situation I am running in to is this: I have a random modifier set to the length of a video in seconds, setting where the start of a video plays. What im trying to accomplish is having the video jump to a random point in the overall video every time a kickdrums or snare plays. I've gotten this to work, but honestly it seems like the "randomness" of the random modifier is not very random. I will watch my visuals and see it consistently jump to specific points in the video over and over. I have tried having multiple random modifiers at different values stacked to improve the randomness of the value being assigned to the start time of the video, but even this doesn't seem to remedy the issue much. My question is, is there a better way to get a random value generated so it actually jumps to random points in time of the video? The default random modifier is actually very consistent it seems and I'd like a better way to accomplish what I am trying to do. Maybe I am doing something wrong? Please advise.

Random is likely truly random (for our human purposes) and so there's nothing stopping it replaying the same bit 10 times in a row. You may know that Apple had to change their 'random' algorithm to make it less random for the same reason. There are a couple of things you can try though...

You can use 2 (or more) copies of the video (playing different parts) and switch between them with an input selector.

Perhaps adding a prime step modifier to the start time will reduce the occurrence of repeats with the downside that when they do occur they will be the same.

More complicated but you should be able to index into an array of start times which you can randomise manually or through globals. I haven't tried this.

However, I do use the same technique quite a bit myself and never really had an issue with the randomness. Hopefully this will give you something to think about and please post here if you have a better way.

vaizor wrote:...and see it consistently jump to specific points in the video over and over....

True(!) randomness might even get your project jump to the same point all the time (unlikely, but possible).

What you want is pseudo-randomness, means no point is used twice (or only if you want to), possibly all interesting points in the video are used, and it looks (for a viewer) as if the points were randomly chosen.

I would create a MIDI track with pseudo-random notes and use it for this purpose. Nobody but you (and the readers here ) will know that it's actually deterministic...

Theoretically you could get random values by playing an audio-track with white or pink noise, but that's IMO way to sophisticated for your purpose.