Image effects and tiles

BeamTracer FX Rack turns a camera, uploaded video, image, or visualizer into thermal colors, moving glass, particles, ASCII, and tiles. Add Visual Source when using your own picture, choose an effect, and adjust its controls. Reorder the rack to change how one treatment feeds into the next.

Can I apply one effect to every Mosaic tile?

Yes. In TRACK → MOSAIC, switch MOSAIC on, set TILE CONTENT to UNIFORM EFFECT, and choose TILE EFFECT. Every tile shows the current picture with the selected effect. Adjust the effect controls below the chooser; the tile labels, outlines and eye inset keep their original appearance. ORIGINAL restores the mixed picture, dark and inverted tiles.

Choose ASCII, GRADIENT MAP, THERMAL, INVERT, DUOTONE, POSTERIZE, or DITHER. The controls below the chooser appear for the selected effect. They work independently of the same effects elsewhere in the rack and are saved with your look. Dither’s dot pattern follows the canvas rather than restarting inside each tile; EDGE PRESERVE reads neighboring tile pixels. MOSAIC OPACITY and MOSAIC GLOW still control the picture tiles and their guides.

Tile ASCII omits STEADY; tile THERMAL omits BODY HEAT and TRAIL. Add the full effect to the rack for those controls.

How do I mix repeatable effects across Mosaic tiles?

In TRACK → MOSAIC, switch MOSAIC on and set TILE CONTENT to RANDOM. Enter RANDOM SEED to choose a repeatable mix of four effects from the seven tile treatments. Adjust the controls shown for that mix; labels, outlines, and the eye inset keep their original appearance.

The seed and effect controls are saved with your look. The seed accepts up to 120 characters; a blank seed uses BEAMTRACER. Keeping the same seed preserves the effect mix, but assignments can change if tracking loses or reorders people. Use UNIFORM EFFECT when every tile should share one treatment.

How do I repeat complete images with Clone?

In BeamTracer, add CLONE to the FX Rack, then repeat the current picture or upload a named collection of still images. TILED arranges complete pictures in rows; RADIAL puts them around a ring. Each copy keeps its proportions. Use transparent artwork to retain openings inside a ghost or pumpkin.

1. Open FX Rack in Performer mode and add CLONE under ADD AN EFFECT.
2. Choose CURRENT PICTURE, or enter COLLECTION NAME and click UPLOAD IMAGES for up to 16 PNG, JPEG, or WebP still images.
3. Choose TILED or RADIAL, then set COPIES, COPY SIZE, COPY GAP, and ROTATION. Keep motion unassigned for a still arrangement.
4. Choose ORDERED or RANDOM under IMAGE ASSIGNMENT. RANDOM SEED makes random assignments repeatable; NEXT IMAGE advances manually. Assign ADVANCE IMAGE to Count or Toggle to advance on threshold crossings, with MINIMUM DWELL limiting rapid changes.
5. Load your audio file, click RENDER, choose MP4 · H.264 or WEBM · VP9, output size, and frame rate, then click RENDER VIDEO and SAVE VIDEO.

SAVED COLLECTION selects a named collection. Up to eight collections share a 64 MiB original-file budget; a single file can be up to 32 MiB. Save a look to retain the collection selection and settings. Keep the originals: after reload, or recalling a look whose originals were released, use RECONNECT ORIGINALS and select the same files. If preparation fails, the previous ready pictures stay visible.

Clone uses still images; animation in uploaded images is not played. It arranges pictures in rows or a ring. Transparent artwork keeps holes inside the copies, but the final Performer video is opaque. MIX at zero shows the original picture. Numeric Clone controls use the normal music, MIDI, and OSC controls. IMAGE STEP is a numeric control; ADVANCE IMAGE has its own assignment and no dedicated fixed OSC address.

How do I animate Tile Art characters?

For moving Tile Art characters, choose Letter Keycaps, select Kanji, Korean Hangul or another symbol set, then set Symbol Motion → Cycle. Symbol Rate sets the number of character steps per second. Still holds the assignment; Symbol Shift changes its starting position and can also take an audio or LFO assignment. Random · Mixed keeps the same mixed set while Cycle advances through it.

How do I make the picture look like a thermal camera?

Add THERMAL and pick a PALETTE: WHITE HOT and BLACK HOT (hot as white or as black), RED HOT (white hot with the hottest areas in red), FUSION, IRONBOW, ARCTIC, RAINBOW HC, OUTDOOR ALERT (black hot with the hottest areas in orange and yellow) and SEPIA. ALERT sets where RED HOT and OUTDOOR ALERT start coloring. Heat comes from the picture, the way a thermal camera would see it: under HEAT, BODY HEAT makes the people it tracks run hot against a cooler room, SKIN HEAT warms faces and hands, and COLD SKY turns a bright blue sky cold. Under CAMERA, LEVEL and GAIN set the contrast, DETAIL sharpens edges on the soft heat picture as a real thermal camera does, SOFTNESS sets how soft the sensor is and NOISE adds its grain. Under STYLE, TRAIL leaves heat behind whatever moves, SHIMMER wobbles the picture like heat haze and TEXTURE lays a paper grain over the colors. BODY HEAT follows the visual source or the picture itself. An uploaded video keeps its body tracking when rendered.

How do I leave a trail of earlier copies behind me?

Add DELAY. It lays earlier copies of the picture over the live one: COPIES sets how many, SPACING how many frames apart they are, and FADE how much fainter each older copy gets. A copy shows only where the picture has changed since, so a still room stays clean while your hands leave a fan of copies behind them, and wherever you are moving now stays sharp on top. APPLY TO: PERSON cuts every copy to your outline (it needs a camera or video showing a person), so a moving background or someone walking behind you does not echo; WHOLE FRAME echoes everything that moves, a visualizer included. BLEND: LIGHTEN keeps only the parts of a copy brighter than the picture, glowing trails on a dark room, and HUE STEP turns each copy further round the color wheel. HIT adds copies for a moment, so a kick throws a longer trail. When rendering an uploaded video, PERSON follows the person in each frame. Without a video source, it echoes the whole frame.

How do I turn myself into moving glass?

Add STEALTH over a camera or a video of a person, and they turn into invisible glass: you see the room through them, with their face and hands traced as glass edges. For the cleanest result, give it a CLEAN PLATE, a picture of the empty room: press CAPTURE and step out of frame within three seconds, or press IMAGE and choose a photo of the room taken from the same spot. With a clean plate the glass shows exactly what is behind you. Without one, STEALTH learns the room around you and bends and stretches it through the glass, so it works with no setup too. DETAIL sets how much of their features shows in the glass, REFRACTION how strongly it bends, and SHINE the highlights on its curves. Every move leaves a liquid wake: TRAIL and SPREAD decide how long and how wide it flows, SOFTNESS rounds it, and SENSITIVITY and LAG set how little movement counts (lower SENSITIVITY if a busy video ripples everywhere). APPLY TO: MOTION glasses only what moves, and is what STEALTH does over a visualizer or a picture with nobody in it; MASK: EDGE keeps only the outline. GLASS: CLEAR bends their picture instead of hiding it, and TIME WARP: DELAYED then shows the glass a moment late. TRAILS: TINTED colors the glass with TINT, and AURA lights a halo around it. Assign REFRACTION or TRAIL to the music and the glass breathes with the track; HIT pushes the refraction for a moment. When rendering an uploaded video, STEALTH follows the person in each frame. Without a video source, it glasses what moves.

How do I turn a video into particles?

Try LOOKS → FLOWER WAVES for a colorful flower made of moving particles. When no source or another built-in example is showing, the look loads FLOWER; your selected camera, screen, image, or video stays in place. VISUAL SOURCE → FIT → WHOLE PICTURE keeps the whole flower visible in any frame. Select FLOWER under OR TRY AN EXAMPLE to use the built-in artwork.

In BeamTracer Viz, load a video or image under VISUAL SOURCE, then add PARTICLES. MODE: CLOUD keeps the picture recognizable as colored squares; WAVE and TWIST add motion. Use RENDER for an uploaded video, or RECORD for live camera and screen sources.

Add PARTICLES. In MODE: CLOUD (the default) the picture is rebuilt from small squares, each in the color of its spot, so it stays recognizable: a photo holds still and a video plays in particles. GRID sets how many across, LAYERS stacks copies of the picture in depth LAYER GAP apart, and SWING (with SWING SPEED) turns the whole cloud in 3D while FAN turns each layer its own way, the layered sculpture look. POINT SIZE, SHAPE (square or disc) and SOFTNESS shape each particle, SHINE catches the light on the ones facing you, DEPTH pushes the bright parts toward you and TURBULENCE makes the cloud shimmer (HIT shakes it on a beat). EMIT FROM picks what is built: ALL, BRIGHTNESS (above THRESHOLD), PERSON (only you, whatever is behind you; it needs a camera or video showing a person) or EDGES (outlines, for a drawn look). SOURCE: MODEL builds the cloud from a 3D model instead of the picture: MODEL picks one (the two Daft Punk helmets, a stormtrooper, a TIE fighter, a lightcycle or a recognizer), POINTS how many dots are sprinkled over its surface, ORBIT how fast it turns, TILT how far it leans toward you and MODEL SIZE how big it stands. Switching to a model turns COLOR to RAMP, a palette from bottom to top (pick it under RAMP), and PICTURE off, the holographic look; choose COLOR: PICTURE to color each dot from the picture or visualizer behind it instead. TRAILS with TRAIL ZOOM leaves a smear that pulls toward the middle, and the rack's GLOW makes it bloom. STREAM FROM: CLOUD streams particles off the model too.

MODE: SNAP turns the subject to dust, like the snap in the movies: a ragged front sweeps across it, the picture crumbles into grains in its own colors that blow away, and what was behind shows through. SWEEP picks the direction (TO RIGHT, TO LEFT, DOWN, UP, or OUT and IN from the middle), DURATION how long one sweep takes and HOLD the pause at each end. REPEAT: ONCE dissolves and stays gone (HIT plays it again), LOOP dissolves, then fades the picture back and goes again, and PING-PONG dissolves and then flies the dust back in to reform the subject. RAGGED and GRAIN shape the crumbling edge, ASH grays the picture just ahead of it, and BLOW sets how hard the dust is thrown. Set EMIT FROM: PERSON so only you dissolve, and load a CLEAN PLATE (step out of frame and press CAPTURE, or choose a photo of the empty room) so the room appears where you were; without one, SNAP reveals black.

MODE: STREAM instead lets particles be born on the picture and flow off it: DENSITY, LIFE, DRIFT DIRECTION, DRIFT SPEED, SIZE and SCATTER shape the stream. STREAM FROM: CLOUD keeps the picture as a still particle cloud and sheds the stream from its points, each in the color of the point it left. In either mode COLOR: TINT paints the particles one color and TRAILS leaves a smear behind them. PICTURE sets how much of the source shows underneath, and once it is up, BLEND decides how the particles meet it: BRIGHTEST keeps the picture's own colors, ADD glows and OVER lays the particles on top. Controls that would do nothing in the current setup are hidden until they would (THRESHOLD appears with EMIT FROM: BRIGHTNESS or EDGES, TINT with COLOR: TINT, TRAIL ZOOM once TRAILS is up, and so on). THRESHOLD SOFTNESS rounds the brightness cutoff so dark petal edges can survive without background specks. WAVE sends shallow ripples outward through the picture, with WAVE RINGS setting their spacing. WAVE SPEED sets their pace; WAVE AUDIO makes bass and treble accelerate them, and WAVE SMOOTHING softens those speed changes. TWIST adds a separate gentle turn around the center. ROTATION VARIATION gives the small squares different orientations. On small screens the cloud uses a lighter grid; reduced-motion preferences hold the new ripple and twist motion and remove trails. DISSOLVE trades the picture and the particles through a drifting pattern, like watercolor, with DISSOLVE SCALE and DISSOLVE SPEED. HAND STIR lets your hand on camera stir the particles: those within STIR REACH of your hand (or your fingertip while you point) swirl around it, an open palm pushes them away and a pinch gathers them and winds the swirl tighter. It works in CLOUD and STREAM over any picture, visualizer or video, follows the camera or video in Visual Source, and fades out when your hand leaves the frame.

How do I turn the picture into ASCII art?

Add ASCII. With MATCH: SHAPE every cell takes the character whose shape fits that patch of the picture best, so the edge of a jaw becomes a slash or a bracket and outlines read as drawn lines; SHARPEN crisps those edges. TONE picks by brightness alone, the classic look, and DITHER spreads the in-between tones. CHARACTERS chooses the set: STANDARD (ten levels, the steadiest on moving footage), DETAILED (seventy), LETTERS, TERMINAL, MINIMAL, BINARY, SYMBOLS, your own on CUSTOM, BRAILLE dots, or drawn marks (BLOCKS, DOTS, LINES, DIAGONAL, CROSS, DIAMOND). CELL SIZE is the character height and FONT the typeface: TERMINAL, JETBRAINS (the app's own) or TYPEWRITER. Under FIELD, the characters can draw a pattern instead of the picture: falling RAIN, spreading WAVES or flowing NOISE, shaped by FIELD SPEED and FIELD SCALE; FIELD MIX blends it with the picture, and with COLOR on SOURCE the picture's colors show through the rain. Under COLOR, keep the picture's colors, snap them to the 16 or 256 terminal colors, or print in a PALETTE: PHOSPHOR, AMBER, NEWSPRINT, POCKET CAMERA and more, or your own INK on PAPER. A light paper prints dark text on the shadows by itself; INVERT flips it either way. FILL colors each cell's ground, BACKDROP lets the picture show between the characters, STEADY averages the last few frames so camera noise stops flipping characters back and forth while real movement still comes through, and FLICKER keeps the characters re-dealing while the tones hold.

How do I make outlines glow, wave with the music or rain?

Add EDGES and pick a STYLE. TINT and NEON draw the outlines as they are; the glowing styles turn them to light. SHOCKWAVE paints the outlines of whatever moves with colored waves spreading from the middle; DEPTH pushes thin outlines out into a glowing shell with an echo behind them; FOLD pours them into a flowing, folding field of color; ECHO PARTICLES lights them in silver where waves pass and lets them drift away; KINETIC freezes them on each beat and pops copies outward (POP RATE keeps it popping without music); RAINBOW paints only the outlines that move in rainbow rings that jump on every beat; BLUE draws every outline as blue-to-yellow neon with red where the picture moves, over a diagonal hatch and a faint grid; PARTICLE RAIN draws them in falling rain that gathers on the outlines, falls faster with the music and scatters on the bass. SCOPE makes the glowing outlines wave with the sound like an oscilloscope trace; SCOPE WAVES sets how many waves run along them. GLOW, GLOW COLOR and PICTURE set how bright the light is, its color and how much of the picture shows underneath.

To make the outlines less even, open DISPLACE and pick a pattern: ZIGZAG bends them in angular kinks, SPIKES throws spikes around the middle, NOISE lets each part drift its own way, and SPECTRUM pushes them out with the music's frequencies. DISPLACE AMOUNT, DISPLACE DENSITY and DISPLACE SPEED set how far, how fine and how fast; WHERE IT MOVES keeps the bending to traveling segments, one side, a rotating sweep or a scan; DISPLACE AUDIO bends further when the music is loud. With KINETIC, COPY VARIATION bends each popped copy its own way so the copies stop matching. DISPLACE works with every style; SCOPE sits in the same section.

How do I draw rings around a logo, text or a person?

Add DISTANCE RINGS. It finds a shape in the picture and draws rings around it like a contour map: one color outside the shape (OUTSIDE COLOR) and another inside it (INSIDE COLOR), darker near the edge and brighter away from it, with a bright line on the edge itself. SHAPE: BRIGHTNESS picks whatever is brighter than THRESHOLD, which suits a glowing logo or text visualizer such as Audioreactive Logo; ALPHA follows artwork with a transparent background, EDGES rings every outline, and PERSON rings you without a green screen. Raise THRESHOLD to hug a glowing logo more tightly, or lower it to take in more of the picture.

RING DENSITY sets how many rings fit across the picture, RING SPEED how fast they travel, RING CONTRAST how deep the bands are, EDGE GLOW how bright the edge line is, and FALLOFF how quickly the color comes up away from the edge. DIRECTION sends the rings OUT, IN, or away from the edge on BOTH sides. The music speeds the rings, every beat sends a bright pulse outward from the shape and the bass widens it; AUDIO sets how much. PICTURE shows the picture through the rings. For rings that fold into a cross, try the SONAR CROSS look; for rings echoing out from the Audioreactive Logo, try LOGO ECHO.

How do I leave a glowing ghost or pop-art copies behind me?

Add DELAY and set STYLE. GHOST leaves a glowing trail behind whatever moves and OUTLINE only its edges, in COLOR: ORIGINAL, GREEN, VIOLET, BLUE, MAGENTA, AMBER, WHITE or the PICTURE's own colors. LIGHT TRAILS paints long strokes with the bright things that move; LIQUID MEMORY lets the whole picture flow like a melting memory; BLAST keeps two seconds and bursts them back on the beat; POP ART snapshots you on each beat and lets the copies grow and melt outward in pop colors behind you. BLEND: ADD and SCREEN brighten the copies over the picture.

How do I make smoke come off me?

Add SMOKE. Whatever moves smolders: its outline leaves a trail in its own colors that drifts off and fades, and smoke pours off it, rising, rolling and curling away before it thins out. The bass pours more and lifts it higher; BEAT REVEAL opens the picture on a beat in a loud passage, and PIXELATE above 1 turns the smoke into blocky cells.

How do I turn the picture into a grid of glowing cells?

Add MOSAIC (the full-frame effect, separate from TRACK → MOSAIC). It cuts the picture into square cells in the picture's own colors: whatever moves lights its cells up (GLOW), and the brightest group locks inside an outline whose color LINE COLOR sets. PALETTE runs from ORIGINAL through ELECTRIC (a glowing heat board) and BLUES, COFFEE, LEMON, TANGERINE, RED, PINK, CHARCOAL, SILVER, VIOLET, LIME and SKY; STYLE draws the tiled palettes FLAT or INSET. For a heat-camera look, stack THERMAL above it. The cells stay square in a tall window.

How do I make the picture look like a broken TV?

Add TV and pick a SIGNAL. BAD SIGNAL pushes the picture along its edges and through static, tears rows sideways on hits and sends rings out from the middle on the beat. VHF RECEPTION is an old broadcast under scanlines that breaks up when the music gets aggressive. HIT sends a ring and a burst of torn rows, or slams the reception into a glitch.

How do I make the picture melt?

Add DISTORTION with STYLE: MELT. Once the music starts a curtain comes down the frame: above it the picture stays live, below it the picture melts like oil. HIT drops the curtain at once.

How do I send waves through the picture?

Add POND RIPPLE and pick a STYLE. RIPPLES sends single crests across a pond (BROAD WAVE adds a wider wave under them and IMPACT PULSE swells them on every beat); WAVES lays liquid waves over the picture, and MIRROR POOL sets how deep they look; WAVE PULSE sends fronts across the frame, shaped by DIRECTION, SPREAD, SIZE, SPEED and BEND. For a living pattern instead, add WATER with STYLE: DIFFUSION: it grows over the picture as the music feeds it; COLOR runs from gray to vivid and GRAIN adds fine grain. STYLE: WAVES + DIFFUSION grows it over the rippling picture, and BLEND crossfades between the two.

How do I push the picture out toward the camera?

Add ZOOM with STYLE: PULSING TILES. The picture is cut into tiles that come forward with the music and are cut again on every beat from wherever the picture moves. DEPTH, MOTION FOLLOW, TILE SCALE, TILE OPACITY and TILE LIGHT shape them. With STYLE: MAGNIFY, PULSE punches the zoom in on every beat.

How do I draw the picture as a tight field of points?

Add PARTICLES with MODE: TIGHT CONTOURS. A dense field of points shows only on the picture's edges and wherever it moves; CONTOUR GAIN sets how much shows. BEAT LIFT lifts the points on the beat and LIFT RELEASE sets how slowly they settle.

How do I leave fading heat ghosts?

Add THERMAL and turn GHOST on. Whatever moves leaves warm afterimages that fade over time: FADE sets how long they last, GHOST OPACITY how strong they are, and OUTLINE with OUTLINE OPACITY adds a hot edge.

How do I make the performer slip out of sync?

Add STEALTH with STYLE: DESYNC. The performer slips out of step with themself and streams along the frame, faster with the music.

How do I make the picture collapse on the beat?

Add DITHER with ALGORITHM: BIT AVALANCHE: on each beat a front sweeps the frame and collapses the picture to a few colors; AVALANCHE sets how hard. For a backdrop that breaks into blocks, add PIXELATE with KEY: LUMA KEY: dark and pale, colorless parts of the picture (a dark room, a white wall) turn into blocks that pulse with the music, while the performer stays sharp.

Which effect combinations can I try?

• Start with one effect and add others one at a time — the order changes the look more than any single slider.
• Feedback with a small Zoom under Kaleido turns any visualizer into a tunnel of mirrored trails.
• Halftone, Dot Screen and ASCII read best on visualizers with large shapes and strong contrast.
• Map a few HIT buttons to drum pads for effects that land on the beat. Shake HIT on the kick is the classic.
• Droste with a little Spiral turns any visualizer into an endless tunnel of itself; assign bass to its Speed to surge forward on every kick.
• Slit-scan shows best on visualizers with steady motion: each strip of the frame is a moment older than the last, so movement bends across the screen.
• Posterize or Duotone after Hex Tile gives a screen-printed mosaic.
• Assign the beat to Beat Flash → Intensity to wash the picture toward the flash color on every kick, or map its HIT to a pad.
• Row Tear with its HIT on the snare breaks the picture up like a damaged signal for a moment, then lets it settle.
• Mirror Fold before Kaleido turns any visualizer symmetrical first; Glow and Lens Streaks last in the list make the brightest points bloom and streak.

Where do I go next?

Return to the FX Rack overview to choose another task. Compare controls in the effects reference, or follow the rendering guide to save your result.