An African-American spiritual song from at least 1909. It refers to the Biblical story of the Prophet Elijah’s being taken to heaven by a chariot.
I have four different pipelines I use to generate video. This is the simplest, that I actually call ‘Simple Pipeline’.
Oddly enough, there are no videos on the channel that use the simple pipeline. There is a single video I posted on my personal channel:
If my source file is not already a MIDI file, I use MuseScore to convert the source from MuseScore’s native .mscz format to MIDI.
MIDI files do not store audio, but just instructions to play specific notes on specific instruments. I use TiMidity++ to convert the MIDI file in a FLAC file containing real audio.
FLAC is a Free Lossless Audio Codec, somewhat akin to MP3, but lossless. For “normal” audio, FLAC files are really big, but the since the audio generated from MIDIs is unnaturally more consistent, it tends to compress very well.
I used the previously mentioned MIDI visualizer to generate the visualization. This takes a settings file, and a MIDI file as input and produces a series of PNG files as output.
The settings file is mostly the same every time, but I do tweak the color selection where I think it would be appropriate.
The output can be quite… extreme. The visualization runs at sixty frames per second, which means I get a lot of 4K images. A ten minute video produces 36,000 for instance.
Finally, I bring it altogether using FFmpeg. It takes the source images and source audio and generates a video file. The format details are largely dictated by YouTube’s suggestions:
A visualization of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” (Norwegian: I Dovregubbens hall, literally “In the Dovre man’s hall”) by Edvard Grieg from 1875.
Incidental music for the sixth scene of act 2 in Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 play Peer Gynt.
Visualization of the Flying Battery Zone theme from Sonic and Knuckles on the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive.
This is high level overview of how I make my videos. I hope to produce further posts with more detail.
One of the most popular programs used for doing music visualizations like the ones I produce is Synthesia. It’s an designed for learning the piano, and can render and play pretty much any MIDI file. For my purposes it has a major downside though, it only runs in real time. This means I have to let it run live and record it using some screen recording software. I then have to do some editing to cut out unwanted content at the beginning and end and clip out UI.
Instead, I’m using the cunningly named MIDIVisualizer by kosua20 and ekuiter. It can be made to render offline and thus eliminates the problems with Synthesia. One minor downside is it doesn’t actual play audio, but that is easy to deal with.
MuseScore is software for writing and editing music scores, and has support for importing and exporting in various formats. I primarily use it for either creating the original music or cleaning up existing music. For the full score visualizations I also use it to generate the actual audio.
Timidity is a command line tool for synthesizing audio from a MIDI file. I use it to generate audio for the modes retuning videos.
FFMpeg is the real workhorse of the process. It’s a command line too for manipulating audio and video. I use it for at least the following:
All the above is combined together with a custom tool that runs all the individual bits in a pipeline.
