[Sharing] Alternative to [mtr] for automation

seejayjames's icon

I put together this little example patch to show an alternative to [mtr]. It uses a .mov to store and play back your automation, which gives you a lot more flexibility: rate, direction, scrubbing through the sequence, and of course any jit.FX you can imagine. Probably you can get some interesting results if you take your streams of data and run them through jit.brcosa etc, or even if you just save the .mov with some compression---the artifacts become newly-introduced values, rather than just annoying fuzzy bits in an image...

The example records the data raw, so it plays back as it was recorded, though there's a smoothing option using [line]. This helps if you play back a sequence very slowly, it eliminates some of the jumps between values.

This version handles 8 values from 0-255 in a char matrix, so you can readily add as many more values as you want, plus additional jit.qt.movie controls. With 8 values the data rate is only about 1 KB per second, so the resulting file size is no problem.

Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.

Have fun with the new possibilities!

woyteg's icon

altough i'm stuck in projects and have no space in my head for testing this, this sounds really helpful and interesting!!

7391's icon

Thanks a lot that's sooooo smart

Andrew Benson's icon

You should have a look at the GestureRecord recipe here:
https://cycling74.com/tutorials/jitter-recipes-book-2/

This allows you to use floating point numbers by encoding the values as 4-plane char.

AB

ironside's icon

This looks really interesting, and an elegant solution. I found that using vidll or avf foundation, the above patch crashes Max 7, but if you set your playback object to @engine qt it works fine.

EDIT: I'm actually still having issues with this. I seem to only be able to record one track. The Max window reports: jit.record: an unknown error occurred (-16364)