[MusicViz Project] Part 3 - Breakdown of FFMPEG "showcqt" Experiment

This is the third installment of my ongoing series of posts on one of my long-term projects to develop a new automated technique for visualising music.

To motivate today's discussion, here is the final video clip rendered from the experimental technique being discussed in this post: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTMpzmdI9qQ

 

And here is the command used to render that:

ffmpeg -y -i 20230803-v02.flac -filter_complex "[0:a]showcqt=s=500x1920:axis=0:cscheme=0.6|0.7|0.1|0.1|0.8|0.5,crop=500:1392:0:4000,setsar=1,transpose=2[vcqt]; [0:a]showwaves=mode=cline:s=1920x100[vs]; [vcqt][vs]overlay=y=H-100[v]" -map "[v]" -map "0:a" -c:a aac "mv_20230803.mp4"

 

Let's annotate that to show the different parts more clearly (see the breakdown following this for a rough description of what each part does):

ffmpeg -y -i 20230803-v02.flac -filter_complex "[0:a]showcqt=s=500x1920:axis=0:cscheme=0.6|0.7|0.1|0.1|0.8|0.5,crop=500:1392:0:4000,setsar=1,transpose=2[vcqt]; [0:a]showwaves=mode=cline:s=1920x100[vs]; [vcqt][vs]overlay=y=H-100[v]" -map "[v]" -map "0:a" -c:a aac "mv_20230803.mp4"

Making of "Year of the Horse" Greeting video

Today is the first day of the Chinese New Year 2014. It is the year of the horse. If you haven't done so already, go check out the greeting video I created for this.

The story of how this video came to be goes back over 12 years...

Learnings from Promo Video Project - Improvements Needed for Blender

In this post, I'll go over some of the problems I encountered while working on the promo video, along with some proposed solutions for some of these. As always, this process has only highlighted the need for developers to seriously use the software they (and/or their fellow devs) write: it's only through such exercises that we can really pick up on things that are a pain in actual usage (vs any largely hypothetical assumptions we may hold/have held).

NOTE: At least one of these improvements is now in trunk. Namely, the "reverse" option for the Build Modifier (5c74ac2). More details later...

EBook Promo Video - Recent Advances Towards Improved Phytoremediation of Heavy Metal Pollution

As you may have noticed from the lack of posts on this blog (and commits/bugfixes in Blender), I've been somewhat busy working on various projects over the past few weeks. Last night I finished work on my main project over that time: a promotional video for dad's new e-book, Recent Advances Towards Improved Phytoremediation of Heavy Metal Pollution.