10×10 px movie becomes blur

[kleurbleur]

Probably a rare thing to do, but I want to send a 10x10px movie from Max to MadMapper. Everything looks good in Max but when opened in MadMapper, SimpleClient or another Syphon client the image looks very anti-aliased. See the screen recording for the result.

I already tried interp, blend_mode etc. in Max to stop the anti-aliasing from happening. I also noticed that making a 10×10 movie in Motion is impossible, that an animated GIF of 10×10 is possible but then converting that to a quicktime movie is blurring it again. Also loading the GIF in VDMX is blurring the image.

Don’t really know where to go with this… seems like the OSX is doing a sort of anti-aliasing on itself in the qt framework somewhere. Does anybody have some experience with this?

The screenrecording:
http://www.kleurbleur.nl/uploadfiles/pixelmovie.mov

[bangnoise]

The anti-aliasing is happening at the drawing stage in the client apps – normally it’s desirable to draw upscaled content with anti-aliasing.

For presentation on a > 10×10 display, I would do the resizing yourself prior to sending it to Syphon so you can control the process. For what it’s worth, you could try filing a feature request for MadMapper to be able to skip anti-aliasing.

If you’re presenting it on a 10×10 device, make sure your output resolution in MadMapper is set to 10×10.

For recording, if you record at > 10×10 then it is likely to be anti-aliased during recording. If you record at 10×10 then you should get a faithful copy of the original – but of course if you play it back above its original resolution then the player is likely to anti-alias it for display.

[kleurbleur]

Thanks for the quick reply! I think I will make the matrix in Max ten times as big (or whatever it needs to not blur the hell out of it), just gives me another headache to solve in terms of updating all those pixels. It was nice and simple as it was. 🙂

Will make the feature request to Garagecube btw, can be handy especially with the new MadLight feature.

[kleurbleur]

I was thinking about this agian. Is SimpleClient also adding anti-aliasing to the image? Just out of curiosity.

[vade]

If you are viewing an image larger or smaller than its original size, filtering has to be applied for scaling regardless of Syphon or not.

Default filtering is GL_LINEAR, or a linear filtering model, not a pixel art esque GL_NEAREST, for nearest neighbor filtering.

Thus if you are viewing a 10×10 image at anything larger or smaller than 10×10, it will be filtered with GL_LINEAR filtering. Understand, the actual Syphon stream has *no* filtering applied as it is not being scaled at all – it is only on the onscreen viewing where filtering is applied.

Simple Client is not meant to be anything other than a basic QA test to ensure Syphon streams are being properly published and received and driven by the renderer appropriately.

If you want to force nearest neighbor filtering on your output, you have to do that via a feature in the application your are actually intending to use as a Syphon Client.

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