garageCube

Hello, I'm just learning Madmapper, but I'm quite familiar with Resolume. Is there a way to create compositions by layering videos, shaders, materials, etc., with different opacity settings and/or blend modes for different layers? For example have a video with lots of black in it, and alpha channel, and would like to play a material or shader "behind it", on the same surface. Possible?

To answer my own question, hopefully to help out other MM newbies -- yes, it is possible. It is done in the stack of surfaces (top-left). Apply a video to a quad. Add another quad and apply another video to it. Change the Blend mode on the top quad to adjust how it interacts with quads below. You can copy and paste the masks from the first quad to the second one, to match the exact shape in the output. It is sort-of demonstrated in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Trd93uPxvyw.

What file format and what codec would you advise for video with Alpha? I'm running windows 11 and davinci resolve.
So far I've tried;
- H.265 with alpha (the video work when reimported into resolve but doesn't have a working Alpha in Mad mapper)
- HAP (this was converted from the H.265 to HAP Alpha, but again does not play with Alpha, unable to test if alpha is good as Davinci resolve does not import HAP)
- DXV 444 High Quality With Alpha (this was rendered out from Davinci resolve and again ALpha tested by reimporting which worked fine but when played in Mad Mapper no alpha seemed present)

I have tried all blend modes (though mainly I'm interested in Over (and over premultiply *though i will admit to not fully understanding the difference between the 2)

basically HELP currently alpha seems broken / non existent to me

thank you in advance regards David

HAP_ALPHA just works.