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Liquid effect

Magnetic Flux

Magnetic Flux is a liquid video effect in FRCTL, the browser VJ studio. Curl-noise flow fields that pull the image like magnetic liquid.

Runs live on video, images, a camera or generated art. Stack it with any other effect, and route LFOs, envelopes or any of ten audio bands to its controls so it moves with the music.

Try Magnetic Flux free All effects

The untouched demo art: an eye inside a triangle over wavy teal, blue and peach lines — Source

The eye-in-triangle illustration churned into dense teal and peach marbled swirls, the triangle barely visible — Magnetic Flux, default settings

What Magnetic Flux does

Pushes every pixel along a curl-noise field, a swirling flow that never piles up or drains, so the picture churns into marbled eddies with no direction of its own. The field drifts slowly across the frame. Swirl sets how small and busy the eddies are, Pull how far pixels travel, Ionize the rainbow sheen multiplied over the result, and Tint where that sheen starts.

Using Magnetic Flux

Where it works: Heavy psychedelic passages and abstract backdrops, where the source only needs to donate its colours. At low Pull it marbles photos into endpaper patterns for covers and merch.
With the music: Send B4 (low mids) to Pull so pads and synth chords stir the marbling harder. Tint on a slow LFO synced to eight bars shifts the sheen colour once a phrase.
Starting point: Swirl a quarter, Pull a quarter, Ionize hard left, Tint hard left, then raise Pull until the triangle's lines start to curl.

Controls

Swirl: Noise domain scale and curl detail.
Pull: Displacement along curl direction.
Ionize: Spectral color sheen over warped image.
Tint: Where the ionised sheen starts on the wheel.
Speed: Rate of the effect motion. Centre is the authored speed, hard left a tenth of it.

Pairs well with Magnetic Flux