Video Serendipity Through BPM Sync.
September 30, 2010
I’ve been tightening up some the BPM-based features of CellDNA (which were fairly loose and buried), adding a “BPM” family of effects. Of course, using these effects is as easy as turning a knob. The more the turn, the faster the time division of the BPM. These effects are:
- BPM_black
- BPM_Effect1
- BPM_Effect2
- BPM_Effect3
- BPM_Effect4
- BPM_jump
- BPM_reverse
- BPM_rndclip
- BPM_xfade
I made a test video, just to see how things are working out. They are working, so I’m posting this!
In this video, I use these BPM_ effects to (mostly) automatically generate a music video for a track I made last week to demo the Code controller. The individual clips are mostly unremarkable, but the fact that everything is happening in sync makes it seem worthwhile:
Here’s the workflow. It’s so sloppy and easy, it’s insane:
Since I know the BPM of the track is 92.7 BPM, I set that as the BPM in CellDNA (though I could have tapped it in, too). I hit “play” on the track (using the track in Soundcloud ). I hit record in CellDNA, then set the BPM_ effects to something like this:
The greater the knob value, the faster the time division of BPM. With these settings in the picture, it’s changing clips sort of slowly, every 2 bars, but jumping to a new frame fairly often, maybe every beat. The “BPM_reverse” effect just toggles the REV button.
I played with these knobs a bit while recording, did a couple of manual FX tweaks, and used the “BPM_Effect4″ knob to automatically change Knob 4 every once in awhile.
I stopped recording after a few minutes, clipped out an arbitrary two minutes of audio from the track (using Audacity), making sure it started on beat, then faded the start and end of my two minute chunk.
I then trimmed 2 minutes of video from the recording in Quicktime MoviePlayer Pro.
Next, I opened and copied the audio in QTMP, and finally added it to the trimmed video in QTMP (Edit->Add To Movie).
Voila! A music video that looks like someone spend a LOT of time editing it. With a better selection of clips, and more attention to effects, this would be a really cool video.
One of the really nice things is that the video is rendered frame-by-frame. If the video gets to be too much for the computer, it doesn’t drop frames, it merely adjusts time. During recording, it may seem to drop frames, hiccup, and not go fast enough, but when you watch the end result, the sync is perfect to the BPM, and all the frames are there. If you are on the stage performing, and aren’t recording in render mode, then everything stays in sync according to a realtime clock. Either way, you’re covered.
I look forward to getting this in your hands!
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