> how do you get to this point where you can look at a thing and say “oh yeah, it’s XYZ”?

What do you mean exactly?

I think GP meant: how do you go from watching the obfuscated video to going, "To see the message I need to use mix=frames=36 with the following weights..."

Oh, well the weight was going to be 1 since I needed the frames need to be fully overlayed, and I randomly ended up at 36, since I just kept upping the frames until I got a good-enough image via trial & error. Then I had to fix the gamma, because it ended up being "smeared," which is exactly what I wanted, but extremely dark and hard to see.

I've learned that a lot of what we think of as art or mastery is just the end result of trying shit and then remembering what works.