Magic Music Visuals

hi

now there's the new jpg folder, which is nice, but it's jpg, so no transparency channel, which a png would have. now i could mask the jpg sequence of course with another jpg sequence, but as far as i remember, having one with an alpha channel runs faster, than one without one and a mask instead. soo.. would a png-folder be a legitimate feature request, or did i oversee something?

I second that, transparent .png folders/sequences would be great and I was surprised that it's not possible. Is there some technical reason for it?

Here's a bit of an explanation: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=678&p=2992#p2997

I can certainly look into creating a "PngFolder" module at some point, but just be aware that the real-time performance wouldn't be very good.

Eric wrote:but just be aware that the real-time performance wouldn't be very good.

but would it be worse than when we would use a mask-sequence in addition to the jpg sequence?

I think so. It depends on each situation, but I did run some tests with .png sequences a while ago, and the maximum speed was several times slower than with .jpg's. For .jpg's, the file sizes are smaller, and most of the decoding work is done with hardware acceleration on the CPU/GPU. For .png's , no hardware acceleration of any kind can be used.

One thing you can do to make a .jpg mask even faster is save it as grayscale so it's 1/3 of the size. It will be read from disk and decoded more efficiently.

okay, jpgs it is then. thanks for confirming.

Also, you can convert your png sequences to .mov files while maintaining alpha.

I use FFMPEG to do it. That's been my workaround.