In Praise of Dither

Videosmith

Hi all

with V3 coming up, I realised that some of the actors I use the most were depreciated in V2, and so could be facing their final curtain call this Sept. One in particular has been my go-to video effect to cheer me up when I need some 8-bit affection:

DITHER

If it is to be struck, I'd like to plea for it's survival, or else I'd like to offer a lament to this cornerstone of my video aesthetic.

Yes, dither is crude, but that is its beauty. In an age of 4k, I want lo-resoution in 16 colours max. As a child of the 80s, raised on a ZX Spectrum, I've held onto a belief that less is more when it comes to pixels. I've applied this belief to my practice, creating infinite glitching poems for Virgin Records, 8 bit waterfalls in the Royal Opera House, and a lo-res translation of Eadweard Muybridge's iconic Horse in Motion, amonst other things.

Plus anything you can dither, you can KNIT! For me, dither is my live connection between the world of video and the world of textiles.

With the development of the the excellent RetroSpecs app, and the Teletext revival, we need need more dithers, not less!

yours, respectfully

Sam

CitizenJoe

This is brilliant:

Maxime

@Videosmith this can be easily found and done with GLSL (like most effects that could be deprecated)

Do a little research on shadertoy.com , i'm sure you will fond something to cheer you up :)

Videosmith

@citizenjoe thankyou :)

Videosmith

@maxime thankyou for the suggestion - I didn't realise there was this whole world out there! I must admit though, I struggle with code, and will miss the direct fuctionality of an out-of-the-box dither actor.

I've had a little play with some samples, but everything is really anti-aliased :S Any tips appreciated

Maxime

@Videosmith can you send me the code you're using?

Videosmith

@maxime

here you go:

Maxime

@Videosmith you're second link is not working but i think i could find this obra dinn dithering shader, but it doesn't work in isadora as there's a buffer in it.

Considering the first one, I don't have this anti-aliased problem as you do..

Michel

@videosmith

I can imagine that your default resolution in Isadora is set very low. You can either change it in the preference settings or over ride it by changing the width and height values of the shader actor to a higher resolution.

Best Michel

mark

@videosmith said:

with V3 coming up, I realised that some of the actors I use the most were depreciated in V2, and so could be facing their final curtain call this Sept. One in particular has been my go-to video effect to cheer me up when I need some 8-bit affection:

Just so everyone knows why I dropped Dither (which I also always liked): it is absolutely QuickTime specific, and that's for sure a no-go in Issadora 3 b/c 32-bit will be gone someday on MacOS and we definitely can't continue to support QT on Windows for reasons outlined in another post. I looked at GLSL algorithms previously, and wasn't satisified that they looked enough like Dither to include them.

Best Wishes,
Mark

Videosmith

@mark cheers Mark - I understand - i am looking forward to V3 in any case :)

Videosmith

@michel it's odd - it was set at 1280 x 720. I'm still getting the aliasing when I set the shader to a low resolution. It's tough to find that balance of a clean dither and a lo-res look.