Hi guys
So here is the situation: I used to love the multiply blend mode is Arena 5. Here is a dummy quick video to show what I mean. Notice the smooth fade in fade out! https://youtu.be/sUvuYoOqCTE
Now in Arena 6 things got a little wild. Transitions not so smooth anymore. It flashes instead of fading in-out. https://youtu.be/q4rnPFHuG8Q
If I start messing with the blend modes/opacity smooth transition is working again. But the problem is I really looking for that particular look that multiply produces at 50% opacity.
There are chances I don't fully understand the logic behind blend modes but it worked nicely in Arena 5. Please help me out here!
Big thanks!
Basically, you start fading in a clip from transparent on your multiply layer, and at the transition start you multiply the below texture with transparent, so your final output is transparent/black.
What you could do would be to place a Solid color effect onto your multiply layer, set it's color to white, and enable the Show image option in the effect.
If you use clips with Alpha on your multiply layer you'd probably also need to switch off the alpha channel on the clips.
This should give you about the same results as you saw in R5 during transitions.
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Hi there,
I have the same problem of theVJ and I strongly disagree with Zoltan.
I don't think how it works now it's the correct way.
Zoltan really with all due respect, your explanation makes no sense to me. No other software on the earth consider multiply transition mode in that way.
I use editing and compositing software since 1996, I have a degree in computer science and my graduation thesis was about image manipulation.
If a clip is completely transparent (and it is when during a transition opacity = 0)
and you apply it on another layer that is not set to any blending mode you should see just the clip below as it is.
Then as soon as the opacity increase you start seeing the result of a full blending mixed with the original clip underneath
the one you are applying the blending mode.
Multiply mode has the easiest blending mode formula f(a,b) = ab.
So if a pixel of the overlying clip is white the result of the multiplication is the pixel in the underlying image
and when you apply the opacity at time t = 0, the pixel should be unchanged at all.
The jump cut to black you see now doesn't make any sense.
The same when you fade out and the opacity of the overlying clip reaches the 0 value!
You have simply broken the concept of smooth overlaying clips, period!
Just be aware I can't use multiply blending mode as it works now so all the efforts you did to make Resolume 6 are useless to me
because I use multiply in every projection because that is the best way to simulate transparencies like overlapping films.
(I did it with super 8 when I was younger and now I love to keep doing digitally for my projections).
I can talk for myself here but I would like all the other Resolume 6 users and lovers could jump in and
say if they would ever use multiply mode to have a smooth transition as it is now. I'm talking about real users that are not afraid to say the truth to help Resolume team to make it a better product!
I hope you will really reconsider this thing because I think playback has really been improved with version 6
and you know how much I've begged you to fix the playback issues in the past.
I would really love to use Resolution 6 but again now it's really impossible for me so even at the next performance I will have on the 25th of August in Leiria I will be constrained to use Resolume 5.
I look forward to hearing from you!!!
I wish you all a wonderful day,
This gets kind of philosophical, but the problem is two conflicting technical interpretations of nothing. Nothing can either mean content that is fully transparent, or it can mean having no content at all.
1) When a layer has nothing / no content in it, it doesn't have to render and can be skipped.
2) When a layer is multiplied with nothing / fully transparent, the result should be nothing / transparent
I think we can all agree that both statement 1 and 2 are valid assumptions and technically correct.
The problem starts when you combine them.
When you eject a layer in multiply mode with a transition, you transition to statement 2. The image will slowly become fully transparent, because you are in transition to nothing / fully transparent. The layers underneath will eventually be completely hidden, because something multiplied with nothing results in nothing.
But. But. Buuuuut. When the transition is over, the outgoing clip is ejected and you enter statement 1, where a layer can be skipped because it has nothing in it. This means the multiply blend is completely skipped and the result is a jump to the layers beneath being completely visible, because they are no longer being multiplied.
So, there we have it. Two things that are technically correct, yet the result is not usable. What a pickle.
Wow nice activity on the topic.
Meanwhile I tried Zoltán's suggestions with the white solid color effect and switching off alpha channel but the result unfortunately the same.
I can see you guys really know this stuff with multiply transitions and the math behind it. I can't even argue with any of you but the fact is fact. The transition is used to work but now it don't.
Maybe it was only a bug in R5 and now in R6 its behaving the mathematically correct way but I think we liked the R5 version better. I could live with the fact that multiply is theoretically faulty if it produces that nice smooth transition.
Instead of ejecting, you could also transition to a solid white source. The downside is that will give a white sheen when the layer opacity is higher than 50%
Good morning to everybody on this thread!!!
I think there are always 2 points of view to be considered one come from the software engineer and the other from the user. The white solid suggestion works on paper and this is from the engineer point of view.
@theVJ to make it work you need to add a white solid on the multiply layer you play it before to go on the projection. From there on every time you click on every other clip on the same layer you will never see the jump. But unfortunately this is the workaround which think only to one possibility and it's always true.
From the user point of view things are different there are always exceptions to be considered. At the moment I have at least 2 situations in which the workaround doesn't work at all. I explain:
1) I have the multiply layer that during my performance need to change blending mode. When I will revert it to multiply and I will have to use that layer I will experience the jump.
2) I use the very useful feature that allow the user to play all the clips in a column at the same time.
Even if I don't change the blending mode I experience the jump again.
@Joris. you say
"1) When a layer has nothing / no content in it, it doesn't have to render and can be skipped.
2) When a layer is multiplied with nothing / fully transparent, the result should be nothing / transparent"
Well I like your point 2 and I'm interested to discuss about it. You make a huge mistake here.
Every blending mode requires two concrete image to be blended. Transparent means something that doesn't exist at all and can't be considered here. Black is concrete white is concrete but transparent doesn't exist and you can't multiply something by transparent (it's like a division by 0 in the R set!!!).
If you multiply something by transparent you get something! Neither white or black but just the image because the multiply operation is not allowed!!!
The mistake you did is to considering transparent like white or black. In other words black is 0, transparent is not 0 transparent simply can't be considered to alter a result. To correct this behaviour you need to call in the opacity concept. Transparent means opacity = 0. So let's say you have layer 1 with clip 1 and layer 2 with clip 2 with blending mode (on layer 2) set to multiply. When opacity = 0 you see clip1 entirely. When the opacity starts to increase you start seeing the blend between the clip 1 and the clip1 multiplied by the clip 2 until to reach opacity = 100 where you see just clip 2.
Anyway I think users are not interested in this philosophical question but they want just the software to work correctly. I've written about this problem immediately after I've tried Resolume 6 for the first time because I hugely use multiply blending mode. I think it's only question of time before users will start looking at it. I think if you have a group of trusted users that love RESOLUME as I did and that are not afraid to say the truth for the sake of this wonderful software you should ask them to jump in here in this discussion.
I'm here and I want to help you so I'm available in discussion to improve it.
I look forward to hearing from you. I will be almost all time off until next Tuesday but as soon as I can I will check this thread and get back!!!!!
Since screen is the opposite of multiply, are you experiencing any issues with transitions involving the screen blend mode or is it working as expected?
At 50% screen, results are exactly as expected and if I eject the clip on a timed transition, I get a nice smooth transition to my bottom layer. In 50% screen, black and alpha are treated equally which is right.
At 50% multiply, results are as expected except that alpha is treated the same as black when it should treated the same as white and reveal 100% of what's below it.
Now because of alpha being treated as black instead of white, at 1% multiply fully covers what's behind it instead of almost fully revealing what's below it so it seems that by treating alpha as white instead of black (the opposite of screen) 50% multiply would work as expected as a blend mode and during transitions. This would match the result I get in Photoshop, After Effect, and other media softwares I've tested.
As a note, I tested with Arena 5.1.4 and the transition with a 50% multiply seems to work as expected but the blend mode still treats alpha as black which is not correct.
I'm attaching the layers I've been experimenting with and the result I would expect to see with the multiply blend mode.
Interesting. Treating transparent pixels as white in a Multiply blend (or doing no pixel operations at all, same thing really), would mean case 1 and 2 are visually exactly the same, so there would be no cut between them.
This will give the result that cropped or smaller res clips used in a multiply blend, will reveal the layers underneath at the edges. Are you sure that's what y'all want? Ie, if you use the attached file at native res to multiply 1920x1080 content in a 1920x1080 comp , what would you expect the end result to look like?
I would personally would expect the same result I get in photoshop where 100% transparency multiplied by a color below yields the color below:
rather than 100% transparency multiplied by a color below yields 100% transparency:
I'm sure opinions will be divided so maybe it would be good to have both available! That would also make working with artists who design content in Photoshop easier when they give me artwork to use in multiply layer.
