The Brief
Evolve the world. Treat the camera, never the content.
The IMAG layer in the existing show reads flat. We want to author five Notch treatments that live on the live camera feed only, never compositing into the city/skyline content. Each treatment sits inside the tour's established palette of crimson, purgatory, destruction, rebirth, and gives the show five distinct emotional registers the operator can call up per song.
- CAMERA TREATMENTS ONLY · no content compositing
- CRIMSON WORLD · tonal continuity with existing show
- REAL-TIME · depth, segmentation, relight, all live
- OPERATOR-DRIVEN · one block per look, hotkey switchable
- NOTCH NATIVE · shipped as .dfx blocks into existing project
Five Modes
One palette, five emotional registers.
01 / DEPTH
Crimson Haze
Live depth injects volumetric crimson fog behind the performer. The city becomes phantom.
02 / RELIGHT
Underworld Light
Stage lighting killed. A single virtual source orbits beneath the form.
03 / DECAY
Decay Trails
AI segmentation isolates the performer. Motion-history decays as pixel-sorted streaks.
04 / SIGNAL
Signal Decay
A failing broadcast monitor at 3am. Tape damage and chroma sickness as the hero.
05 / ATMOSPHERE
Ash Fall
Drifting embers and grey fog. The morning after the fire, cathedral after a burning.
LOOK 01 / DEPTH
Crimson Haze
A purgatorial cathedral, lit through smoke.
An AI depth model runs live on the camera feed inside Notch. The depth pass
is used to inject thick crimson volumetric fog only into the mid and far z-distances, separating the
performer from the city skyline backdrop. He stays crisp in foreground. Distant detail bleeds
through haze as silhouetted phantom. The smoke that was already on stage gets re-grade-amplified
into something cathedral-scale.
Notch Signal Chain
Camera In→AI Depth→Volumetric Fog
→Crimson Grade→Crush Blacks→IMAG Out
→Crimson Grade→Crush Blacks→IMAG Out
TREATMENT
SOURCE FRAME
LOOK 02 / RELIGHT
Underworld Light
A virtual source orbits beneath the form.
Depth from the AI pass is cross-derivative'd into surface normals. Notch
renders a single virtual point-light against those normals, positioned below and oblique to the
performer. The original stage lighting is suppressed in grade. Hard specular hits on mask and
wardrobe, left half of the figure falls to shadow. The whole effect tells the eye the performer
is lit by something that does not exist in the room. Hellfire, not stage rig.
Notch Signal Chain
Camera In→AI Depth→Normals From Depth
→Virtual Point Light→Suppress Ambient→IMAG Out
→Virtual Point Light→Suppress Ambient→IMAG Out
TREATMENT
SOURCE FRAME
LOOK 03 / DECAY
Decay Trails
The body persists. The motion-history decays.
AI segmentation isolates the performer with a soft alpha matte. The original
backdrop is killed to pure black. The matted figure is also fed into an Echo / Trail buffer, which
is then pixel-sorted by luminance, producing dense scanline streaks of crimson and ember decaying
leftward from his silhouette. The performer stays sharp in foreground. The trail is the only color
event in the frame. Destruction and rebirth visualized as data decay.
Notch Signal Chain
Camera In→AI Segmentation→Subject Matte
→Echo Buffer→Pixel Sort (Luma)→Comp Over Black→IMAG Out
→Echo Buffer→Pixel Sort (Luma)→Comp Over Black→IMAG Out
TREATMENT
SOURCE FRAME
LOOK 04 / SIGNAL
Signal Decay
A failing broadcast monitor at 3am.
Pure post-process chain on the camera feed, the analog degradation IS the
look. Multi-band tape tracking jitter slices the figure into laterally-shifted horizontal slip-bands.
Aggressive RGB channel offset along every edge. CRT scanlines drift through the frame. Halation
blooms with chroma bleed around every bright source. The figure survives, wounded, through the
corruption. Most aggressive register of the five, used sparingly for impact moments only.
Notch Signal Chain
Camera In→Tape Tracking Slip→Chroma Offset
→Scanline Bands→Halation→Vignette→IMAG Out
→Scanline Bands→Halation→Vignette→IMAG Out
TREATMENT
SOURCE FRAME
LOOK 05 / ATMOSPHERE
Ash Fall
Cathedral after a burning.
An AI depth pass drives a volumetric fog layer behind the performer. In
front, a GPU particle system runs hundreds of slow-drifting ash flakes and live embers, blown
by curl-noise wind, lit from within. The performer stands clear in foreground, particles drifting
around his silhouette and landing softly on his shoulders. The city scaffold dissolves into the
fog as silhouetted teeth. Post-destruction register, the morning after the fire.
Notch Signal Chain
Camera In→AI Depth→Volumetric Fog
→GPU Ash Particles→Curl-Noise Wind→Crimson Grade→IMAG Out
→GPU Ash Particles→Curl-Noise Wind→Crimson Grade→IMAG Out
TREATMENT
SOURCE FRAME