The video
How it was made
The first thing that was needed for this composition is the use of a music track. Again, I searched on Freesound for a nice sounding beat. This time, I’ve settled on a dubstep beat rather than Drum and Bass for variety. Here is the audio track that I will be working with.
I applied an effect called ‘Audio Spectrum’ and the result were these tiny dots that appeared. Obviously when I play the spectrum composition, I wouldn’t be able to see the beats and the movement in rhythm to the track.
I enlarged the layer so that the contents could be seen, and I’ve also changed the color from purple to green, like so.
A little bit of changing the background and focusing primarily on the spectrum accessed me to change it to tiny dots to give some sort of identity. This is how it would look like in the image below.
I increased the frequency bands of the spectrum and the height to a reasonable and suitable size so that the beats won’t be distorted and fit nicely within the rhythm of the track. I’ve also messed around the the hue interpolation and it shows here. One side is green, the other side is blue, and the middle is the two colours mixed in together.
A little bit of tweaking the thickness to make it look realistic and make it look nicer shows what is in the image below.
With the lone audio track, I feel like the spectrum composition could use some more character, so I implemented a violin track into the piece as well, ensuring that I repeat the same spectrum process as I did with the dubstep beat to make another spectrum just for the long violin track. The purpose of this idea is to use this as a backing for the composition to support the main dubstep beat.
The two grey rectangles on the timeline is the violin track. I had to duplicate the track since it’s very short and would sound out of place for this composition. I wanted to make it start at a suitable point of the track, after the first part of the beat section and wanted it to stretch out to the remaining half, but the audio level keyframes had other ideas in that the track would cut out early or just wouldn’t sound at all. As a contingency effort, I had to stretch it out halfway.
I also had to make sure that the audio levels on both tracks would be equal as to maintain consistency. This image was made at a time where I was considering stretching the violin track out before the contingency plan.
A little glance over at the composition timeline will show something like this, with the levels an equal volume.
Once I was done with the composition, and until I was satisfied with the final result. I added the comp to the Media Encoder queue and had to render the piece twice, one as an MP4 for the wordpress embed, and one as a MOV file to store on Box. I did this step with all of the other compositions. I made sure to select the presets as what was required on the assignment brief.
Overall, the spectrum composition piece turned out alright for me. I was comfortable following through the Canvas material on this specific exercise. The only downside is that the exported video can turn out blurry. This is something I have tried to rectify only to discover the synching issue to appear. Despite trying to get the spectrum to move along with the beats of the tracks, I have decided to just leave it as it. The synching issue probably was caused by my attempts to fix the issue in the Composition Settings window as I was attempting to make the blur disappear. I now know that I have used a black solid as the background, and have left the spectrums’ outlines the same colour, which could identify the cause. I’ve also attempted to change the solid’s background, only to be met with the same synching issue previously mentioned. Other than this slight oversight, I’ve done an alright job on the piece and presumably went beyond with the inclusion of the violin backing track.
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