discopatrick

I have a 5-plane, 1-dimensional matrix. The first 4 planes hold the usual ARGB values, while the value of the additional 5th plane acts as an address.

Here's what I need to do: for each cell in this matrix I need to get the R, G, and B values, and then send them to 3 individual cells of a second matrix that has 1 dimension and 1 plane. The position of these cells will be determined by the aforementioned address. So if the address was 10, the destination cells would be 10, 11 and 12. (The A value will be unused.)

A little background: the reason I am separating out colours into their component RGB values is so they can be used to control a DMX lighting rig. I currently use a 1-plane 1-dimensional matrix of a length of 512 (the number of channels in a DMX universe) as the last step before sending the data out to a DMX interface.

Here is what I have so far. It seems a little cumbersome, and I'm suspecting it's not going to be the most efficient way of doing things. I'm sure someone can show me a better way - perhaps using jit.op or something else from the Jitter family.

need-to-flatten-a-5-plane-1d-matrix-to-a-1-plane-1d-matrix

Actually, this is probably the best way to do it AFAICT. While the process you've created may seem simple, there are some subtle and tricky things about it.

- You're using an address as a lookup to place data in a matrix, which is a scatter operation (you're spreading input data around in an output matrix). Not even jit.gen can do this. Instead, you'd have to convert your scatter into a gather (output pulls data from the input, not the other way around).

- Your input data and output data formats are different in terms of planecount and size. Most jitter objects require uniform input and output formats.

Actually, this is probably the best way to do it AFAICT.  While the process you've created may seem simple, there are some subtle and tricky things about it.

- You're using an address as a lookup to place data in a matrix, which is a scatter operation (you're spreading input data around in an output matrix).  Not even jit.gen can do this.  Instead, you'd have to convert your scatter into a gather (output pulls data from the input, not the other way around).

- Your input data and output data formats are different in terms of planecount and size.  Most jitter objects require uniform input and output formats.


I'm comfortable using basic Max messages to do this and am happy to continue to do so. I'm just wary of running into performance issues, so I'm very interested to know if there are more Jitter-centric ways of doing this.

However, every time I've had a concern about performance in Max, things have turned out ok. Hopefully this will be the same. If it isn't then I may get into coding externals.

Need to 'flatten' a 5-plane 1d matrix to a 1-plane 1d matrix