Getting the look you meant

Recipes

Each of these is available as a Style preset. The settings are listed so you can see what the preset actually changed, and so you know which dial to nudge afterwards.

The looks

Melt — one shot dissolving into the next

The classic transition. Pixels stop refreshing while motion carries on, so the outgoing shot is dragged along by movement that now belongs to the incoming one.

Motion Threshold 0.0     ← everything moshes, not just fast areas
Motion Gain      1.2
Motion Smoothing 0.4
Softness         0.3
Motion Lag       2       ← enough mismatch to stop it looking like a morph

Trigger it by hand, or set Auto Mode to On Cut and let it fire itself.

Bloom — motion piling up on itself

Hold the field — Motion Smoothing all the way up — and the same vectors keep applying every frame. The image stops being a picture and becomes flow.

Motion Smoothing 1.0     ← the whole trick: a full hold
Motion Gain      1.5
Motion Threshold 0.0
Decay            0.1     ← so it recovers instead of collapsing forever

Order matters A full hold keeps whatever field exists at the moment you set it. Push Smoothing to 1 during a still shot and you have held a field of zeroes, and nothing will happen. Let some movement play first, then hold.

Reset is the way out: it drops the history, so the next frame acquires a real field and the hold resumes from that rather than from nothing.

Pixel drag — trails without collapse

Only what is moving fast smears. Still areas stay sharp, so the shot remains readable and the effect reads as motion trails rather than as breakage.

Motion Threshold 0.5     ← the control that defines this look
Motion Gain      2.0
Motion Smoothing 0.2
Block Size       32      ← chunky, and cheap

Liquid — smooth, no visible blocks

The same estimator with the field blurred and the snapping off. Closer to an optical-flow morph than to a codec, which is sometimes exactly what a track wants.

Softness         1.0     ← interpolate between block vectors
Pixel Snap       0.0     ← sub-pixel, so it stays soft
Motion Smoothing 0.5
Block Size       8

Corrupt — everything wrong at once

Every damage control engaged. The furthest from clean motion compensation, and the closest to a genuinely broken file.

Motion Threshold 0.1
Motion Lag       4
Corruption       0.4
Block Repeat     0.3
Quantise         0.7
Chroma Drift     0.4

Quantise 0.7 is a coarse grid Roughly a 6 px step at the default Block Size. Blocks moving slower than half a step hold where they are rather than sliding — a skipped block, which is the point. If you want the movement back as well as the damage, bring Quantise down, or Block Size with it.

Letting the damage creep

Spread is the only control here with a memory of what happened next door. Everything else decides each pixel from this frame alone, so a block that is not moving can never mosh; with Spread up, the corruption starts where the motion is strongest and crawls outward into still parts of the frame.

It reads as a gesture rather than a setting, because bringing the level back down makes the frontier go out first — the damage retreats the way it came instead of snapping off. Ride Mosh Amount with Spread up and the creep grows and recedes with your hand.

Spread           0.7
Mosh Amount      ride it      ← the creep reaches as far as you push
Motion Threshold 0.2          ← a clear seed for it to start from

Painting where it lands

Mask Amount lets the brightness of the motion input decide where the mosh is allowed to stick. In the effect that is the clip's own brightness, so highlights smear and shadows stay clean — or the reverse with Mask Invert.

In Mosh Transplant it is the more useful one: the mask comes from the layer supplying the motion, not the pixels, so a layer of scrolling text or a generator becomes a stencil that also drives the movement. The mask needs that layer to be moving as well as bright — a still logo transplants nothing, mask or no mask.

Mask Amount      0.8
Mask Invert      off     ← on to mosh the shadows instead
Motion Threshold 0.0     ← let the mask do the deciding

Live workflows

Playing it like a key

Hold keeps full mosh up for exactly as long as it is on and ignores Burst Length altogether, so it is the control to play in time with the music rather than fire and wait out.

Leave Mosh Amount at 0, so there is somewhere to go.
Right-click Hold and assign it to a key or a MIDI note.
In the shortcut, tick Piano. That is the part that matters: Piano is what makes a shortcut momentary, and it is a property of the shortcut rather than of the parameter.

The bit that catches people If your pad sends CC rather than Note, the Piano option does not appear at all. Change the shortcut's Mode to Button and it comes back.

Without a mapping there is no held gesture to make — the panel control is a toggle, and a mouse cannot hold a checkbox down. Piano also has an Invert option, which gives you the opposite instrument for free: moshing all the time, and the key punches a clean hole in it.

If pressing it does nothing Check Mosh Amount is not already at 1. Hold and Amount feed the same gate, so at full Amount there is nothing left to add. Presets never touch it, so if it is at 1 you put it there — bring it down to make room for the key.

Reset ends a hold even while the control still reads on, so if a key-up ever goes missing — you alt-tabbed mid-hold, a note-off got dropped — that is the one gesture that gets the picture back.

Auto-melt every cut, hands off

The setup worth doing first, because it needs nothing from you once it is running.

Put Datamosh on the composition, not on a layer — it needs to see the finished image so it can notice clip changes.
Auto Mode → On Cut.
Leave Mosh Amount at 0. The cut detector supplies its own burst; Amount is for holding a mosh open by hand on top of that.
Set Burst Length to taste — around 0.5 s reads as a stutter, 2 s as a full dissolve.

Every clip you fire now melts into the last one. If it fires on fast camera moves as well as cuts, lower Cut Sensitivity.

Motion transplant between two clips

This is what the mixer build is for, and it is the closest the plugin gets to what datamoshing originally was: one shot's motion spliced onto another shot's pixels.

Put the clip you want the movement from on the upper layer.
Set that layer's blend mode to Mosh Transplant. It is in the blend-mode dropdown, not the effects list.
Leave Motion Source on This Layer. The layers underneath now supply the pixels.
Raise Mosh Amount.

Clips with strong, coherent, full-frame movement work best as the motion source — water, smoke, crowds, a whip pan. A locked-off shot has nothing to donate.

Beat-synced stutter

Auto Mode → On Beat, with Resolume's tempo running.
Beat Divisor 4 for once a bar, 1 for every beat.
Short Burst Length — 0.1 to 0.3 s so it punctuates rather than smothers.

Audio-reactive pressure

Rather than switching on and off, let the mix push an already-moshing image further.

Audio Band → Bass to ride the kick.
Audio Amount around 0.3–0.5.
Set Mosh Amount to a low baseline, 0.2 or so. Audio adds on top, so the baseline is what it pushes from.

Use Resolume's audio for anything else This plugin's audio drives one thing: the mosh gate. To make Motion Gain, Softness or the Damage controls move with the music, click the cogwheel beside the parameter and pick an FFT source — you get a draggable frequency range, Gain and Fall, and a choice of Clip, Layer, Group, Composition or External audio. It is better than what is built in here in every respect but one: Audio Amount adds to Mosh Amount rather than owning it, so the slider and Hold still work while audio pumps underneath.

When nothing is happening

Ask the plugin first Set View to Motion. Black means there is no movement to work with and nothing below will help. Lit means there is, so switch to Gate: red is Motion Threshold refusing it, grey is the mask, dim green is the gate open with nothing holding — and black there means the motion never reached the gate at all. It is quicker than the list, and it cannot be wrong about what the effect did, because it redraws the frame the effect just rendered rather than recomputing one.

In the order worth checking, because each one masks everything below it.

Mosh Amount is 0. An exact passthrough by design. It defaults to 0.3, so if it reads 0 someone put it there. Raise it.
Motion Threshold is too high for the footage. It gates per pixel, so anything moving slower than the threshold refreshes normally. Selecting Custom does not reset it, and Drag leaves it at 0.5 — 2 pixels of movement per frame. Set it to 0, or pick Default from the Style list.
Mosh Amount is 1.0 and you are pressing Trigger or Hold. The gate is already saturated, so they have nothing to add. Bring Mosh Amount down to make room — 0 to play it entirely by hand.
Mask Amount is up on dark footage. The mask lets bright regions hold and dark ones refresh, so a dark shot at full mask refuses to mosh anywhere — correctly, and identically to a plugin that failed to load. It defaults to 0; if it reads anything else, that is where to look.
The footage is not moving. There is no motion to estimate and nothing to smear. Datamosh needs movement the way a codec does.

Almost always one of these, roughly in order of likelihood.

Mosh Amount is 0 and Auto Mode is Manual. The plugin is a passthrough by design until something opens the gate.
Motion Threshold is above what the shot is doing. Nothing is moving fast enough to qualify. Drop it to 0 to confirm.
The shot is not moving. The whole effect is built on estimated motion; a locked-off static frame has none to work with.
The field was held before there was a field. Motion Smoothing at 1 is holding zeroes. Bring it down, let movement play, then hold again.
Mix is down. It crossfades the whole result back to the original.
On macOS, the plugin never appeared at all. That is Gatekeeper quarantining an unsigned bundle, not a settings problem — see the install notes.

If it looks too smooth A morph rather than a mosh means the motion estimate is doing its job too well. Raise Motion Lag first — two to four frames is usually enough. Then drop Quality, raise Block Size, or reach into the Damage group.