Animated Title Sequence w/ Music

larry cottrill · Post by **larry cottrill** » Tue Apr 15, 2008 7:29 pm

Two pieces of my "trailer" (YouTube video, really) promo for my proposed DVD. Video and sound quality will be much better on the YouTube version; quality was sacrificed to get this downsized for upload. Be sure to turn up your sound to get a feel for how it coordinates with the video.

The animation of the Lady Anne firing flame bullets is made up purely from thin air, and is not meant to be taken as authentic.

Enjoy -- all comments welcome!

L Cottrill

Bobthemonkey · Post by **Bobthemonkey** » Tue Apr 15, 2008 8:56 pm

Cool!
Did ya make the music yourself?

larry cottrill · Post by **larry cottrill** » Tue Apr 15, 2008 10:23 pm

Bobthemonkey wrote:Cool!
Did ya make the music yourself?

Thanks! No, the music is edited from a freely available MIDI file.

L Cottrill

PyroJoe · Post by **PyroJoe** » Wed Apr 16, 2008 3:35 pm

Larry,
When part2 shows the FWE model next to the segmented graphs with the TIME text and arrow pointing to the right. Are the graphs pressure?
It is great that the beat matches the animation.
Joe

larry cottrill · Post by **larry cottrill** » Wed Apr 16, 2008 4:03 pm

PyroJoe wrote:Larry,
When part2 shows the FWE model next to the segmented graphs with the TIME text and arrow pointing to the right. Are the graphs pressure?
It is great that the beat matches the animation.
Joe

Yes -- they are pressure graphs for the selected longitudinal stations along the engine. The engine rendering itself was done by Eric Beck, I think, and then I added the pressure graphs from UFLOW runs and colored them in. I thought that made kind of an interesting picture of how pressure changes at different points, at different times after the explosion event. It isn't realistic in the sense that the pressure is zero before the explosion, i.e. there's nothing left from a previous cycle. In my animated sequence, I made sure I "went around once" before adding the explosion pressure back in, so it would more nearly resemble a typical running cycle.

The trick to synchronizing the animation and the music is to start out by timing the music track over a fairly long period and then dividing the time by the number of beats counted. It turned out that at 30 frames/second, each beat of the music took up almost exactly 21 frames. Because it's not an exact ratio, an occasional "leap year" frame has to be thrown in to keep the video from gradually creeping ahead of the music.

L Cottrill

metiz · Post by **metiz** » Wed Apr 16, 2008 9:26 pm

Nice vid but, and don't take this personally, you might want to fix your music to sound a bit more proffesional.

Jim Berquist · Post by **Jim Berquist** » Wed Apr 16, 2008 10:45 pm

Yep : Larry it sound like 15% to slow.

You stepped your diagram to the music ? Or the other way around. I see the music in time with the graph. Just too slow.

Sorry! Jim

larry cottrill · Post by **larry cottrill** » Thu Apr 17, 2008 11:40 am

metiz wrote:Nice vid but, and don't take this personally, you might want to fix your music to sound a bit more proffesional.

The audio quality is very poor due to the quality reduction needed to shrink the file. However, I'm sure that's not what you mean.

It's true that MIDI has a very "artificial" sound. All of the instruments are synthesized waveforms. The real purpose of a MIDI file is to give electronic musicians a standard platform to build on -- the files are highly "editable" in terms of the notes themselves, instrument sounds, effects, and even speed (tempo). For me, the important part is that the files are free to use and modify; there are no license fees, etc.

Jim Berquist wrote:Yep : Larry, it sounds like 15% too slow.
You stepped your diagram to the music? Or the other way around? I see the music in time with the graph. Just too slow.
Sorry!

Jim -

No problem; actually, I think you're quite right. Of course, by "slow" you really mean "lagging behind" (like when people say the time on a clock is "slow" ;-). By 15 percent, I assume you mean that it feels like it's lagging about 15 percent of one musical beat, right?

This is the kind of stuff film directors think about. What "drives the scene"? Usually (perhaps in 98 percent of cases), the visual action (including footage of someone speaking) drives the scene, and everything is keyed off that. I thought that's what would happen here, because the visuals are obviously so important. But, this is one of the rare cases where that theory was wrong!

This is an example of video montage, where the pacing of the visual changes is (at least) as important as the visual content. We could say that psychologically, the beat of the music is the driving force to the scene! That goes along with the theme of the promo, which will be to try to show the excitement of building and running valveless pulsejets. I want to basically produce a visceral, not an intellectual, appeal. So, it becomes quite natural that the music should "lead", not tightly synchronize (like the sound of someone seen talking), and certainly not "lag", in this case.

Assuming you meant 15 percent of one beat, we can work out that 15 percent of 21 frames will be about a 3-frame shift from where the beat hits now. The editor keeps the audio and video completely separated as editable tracks, so such a shift is easily accomplished. I'll try bumping the sound ahead 3 frames tonight and see how that looks. If it seems to be an improvement, I'll post these again, so they can be compared with the original files.

Thanks!

L Cottrill