Dense Tapestries

[stardust4ever]

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/PqFEsqkUslA&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/v/PqFEsqkUslA&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1</a>

Click the YT link to watch on Youtube. 60Hz does not work with embedded flash!

I zoom deep into the tapestry underneath the west minibrot of the Quasi Burning Ship 3rd power fractal.

The image is stretched 5,500,000 percent (ratio 55,000:1) after 7.00E004, with pixel magnification creating a slight pixellation just before the floating point library jumps to arbitrary.

Rendered as 3840x2160 frames with 1.26 scaling (approximate cube root of 2, three frames per zoom level) and twenty movie frames per fractal frame (about 2x size increase per second) for anti-aliased 1080p60 FullHD.

Enjoy. Mega download link coming soon because I already know Youtube's fast encoder will choke on it.

2.18Gb Mega download (MP4, H.264 Very Slow CRF=26):
https://mega.nz/#!74sVjbJL!en7pHiUPZMrbgQ5WMJdQ_qfvyMXLkK2JHXScIQT1qn0

Feel free to skip the following "wall of text"; it is just me ranting...

A couple defects in this movie. Firstly, I rendered it in three parts. There is a break at 7.00E004 where I jump from 1:1 pixel aspect to a whopping 55,000:1 horizontal stretch (5.5 million percent). I know there's supposed to be a way to animate the skew effect, but I don't know how. Secondly right before the float point precision library switches to arbitrary. The image is zoomed in 55,000 times horizontally, which translates to almost 15-16 extra bits of precision, so the image pixellates. Lastly, my desktop blue screened somewhere around e75 while rendering the zoom sequence, and I got some corrupted files on my hard drive. Check disk recovered a whopping 1.34Gb chunk of data off my ExFAT internal drive but I have no idea what it is. Recovery.kfb was apparently lost so I had to create a new zoom animation from the point where the previous zoom crashed. So I rendered a new zoom movie in a new folder from the previous point where the crash occured. Unfortunately one of the other zoom frames got deleted and I did not catch this. The frame ratio was 1.26 so it isn't terribly noticeable but there is a skip with visible rectangle at the seam. Also the 2-4Gb filesize limit of AVI is rearing it's ugly head. I'm using 3840x2160 fractal frames to generate 1080p60 zoom videos, and with some of the denser, noisier areas of the set, the Constant Rate Factor settings I use cause the video file size to become excessive. Larger than 2Gb but less than 4Gb results in a watchable but not seekable AVI file with corrupted index which needs to be repaired using Virtualdub. If I hit the 4Gb filesize limit, the entire movie is gone. Splitting up into smaller pieces to join together in VirtualDub or AVIdemux has it's own issues. I am forced to use zero latency for H.264, otherwise a few frames will be dropped at the end of each segment and occasionally stutters and other issues will result from joining the files. Zero latency option adds significantly to the file size, about 50% or so. Full Frames takes up so much hard disk space it's ludicrous, and I tried in vain to get the terribly outdated HuffYUV codec to work but it crashes the Movie Frames Renderer after a few dozens of frames rendered. If use extremely high quality H.264 settings, say CQ=10 or something, zero latency, and shorter movie segments, I still get graphical corruption at the beginning of playback of each movie segment. This is likely because the Movie Frames Renderer is not creating new key frames when starting each movie segment. The new video segments start with B-frames that rely on frames from within the previous segment to render correctly. When played back individually, these movie files display graphical corruption for the first few seconds when played back. Is there another alternative codec to HuffYUV or Full Frames for temporary usage until I combine the AVI frames together in VirtualDub or AVIdemux? The 2Gb file limit is seriously annoying. At least I can reencode and combine clean video files with AVIdemux and save to MP4 or other format if needed. H.264 is perfect for final output but very bad for editing. If I can't work out a solution to the AVI 2Gb limits, I may have to go back to just doing 1280x720p videos in the future. Time to get off my soapbox...

TL:DR version: A couple of artifacts in the video, PC had a blue screen moment while rendering zoom frames, codec problems, and AVI file size limits...

Oh and btw, thanks for watching!  

[Kalles Fraktaler]

It is a lovely movie, with appealing pattern and beatiful colors.

I am sorry for all the troubles (I hope the blue screen was not caused by KF...)
Up to e10, no perturbation is used. So an extreme stretch prior to that may unfortunately cause precision errors. I am not sure how to handle that, perhaps make KF using perturbation much earlier (e3?).
In my extremely stretched movie "Engine block" I had to go to e10 before I could start the stetch.

To animate the the skew/stretch, there is a menu option "Special->Skew animation". When activated, the end stretch parameters and the number of frames are set in a popup.
These frames must be used as movie-frames, and not key-frames, so in KFMM the checkbox "Frame by frame" must be checked for this part (I made Yann add such function in MMY3D as well... )

[stardust4ever]

Wall of text time again...

For the record, I keep my desktop AMD FX-8150 overclocked at 4.2Ghz. 4.2Ghz is the max allowable turbo speed under factory settings. I only adjust the multipliers and don't overclock the front side bus as some people do, since the least tolerant component connected to that bus can take down the whole system. I just simply disabled Turbo mode and APM (Advanced Power Management - downclocks the CPU if TDP is exceeded) in BIOS and set the stock clocks to 4.2Ghz. The CPU has a big heatsink with 92mm smart fan allowing it to exceed it's 125w thermal design power while remaining cool. I briefly attempted to clock it at 4.5Ghz and later 4.4Ghz. This required a tiny voltage step and the CPU ran hot, over ~70C and typically crashed within minutes. I didn't even bother with 4.3Ghz setting as a couple percent point improvement isn't worth the instability.

At 4.2Ghz, the CPU runs stable and this is the only third time in several years my PC has blue-screened, and it often runs 100% for weeks at a time, so it is a fairly rare event. My PC idles around 88 watts at the outlet and the CPU quickly drops to a cool 32-35 degrees Celsius. Human body temp is 37 for comparison. When running the Intel Burn Test (or two simultaneous instances of Kalles Fraktaler ) my rig pulls ~300 watts at the outlet. That's a 212 watt increase in CPU load alone compared to idle, with temps only hovering around ~60C. I set the thermal shutdown temp at 80C so in the event of a fan fail, the whole rig won't go up in smoke. The 120mm exhaust fan and 92mm intake fan are thermally controlled by a special thermal regulator mounted on the exhaust, linear scale from 5V at 28C to 12V at 40C. I have sound dampening foam inside the heavy steel EATX case, with the red LED intake fan blowing air across the hard drive bay and producing a soft red glow in the vents, which gets brighter as the fan speed increases. My rig is whisper quiet on idle but can roar pretty loudly when doing renders.

In 2014 I upgraded from 8Gb (4x2Gb) 1333Mhz DDR3 to a 16Gb (2x8Gb) 1867Mhz dual channel Radeon kit. The high performance memory gives a modest boost in performance with Mandel Machine, but I also get a lot more headway at 16Gb for working with gigantic renders (530Mp). If I get another blue screen event, I may have to do some stress-testing to determine if it's the CPU or RAM. Unlocking the full rated 1867Mhz memory bandwidth on the box required manually tweaking a few timings in BIOS.

Suffice to say it is not Kalles Fraktaler that caused my PC to crash. Also your movie "Engine Block" was what inspired this zoom!

And I can't fathom any reason to use perturbation with float precision; that's just a wasteful and needlessly complex use of CPU resources. Zero performance gain and you would still need to do error fixing. It would just be needed to switch over to arbitrary a little earlier if the skew ratio is set to extremely large values. An "extra bits" user setting like the one in Fractal Extreme could fix that. Also no reason to take blame for my troubles with the AVI format. This ancient standard was established when HD video, or PCs capable of decoding it simply did not exist. I also wish Videolan would hurry and release their open source x265 codec as it may be better able to handle continuous fractal zooms compared to H.264. Nobody will be playing back these extreme bitrate source files (downloadable from Mega) on anything but a PC anyway.