Visualizers and YouTube

For the past couple days I’ve been working on nailing down a good look for a simple visualizer video for when I post things to YouTube or Instagram. It’s always been a chore to get the thing looking juuust right in Adobe After Effects, and DaVinci Resolve never got me results I was happy with. Not to mention all the buttons and settings you have to learn before you get anywhere useful.

So I was incredibly happy when I discovered a program called Astrofox.

Astrofox is free to download and open source, so you don’t have to worry about dealing with features locked behind a paywall or subscription. It’s not as powerful as something like After Effects or Resolve, but it allows you to quickly and effectively get a visualization for your music so you can spend more time making songs and less time mucking about with video presets.

For the past week or so I’ve been tweaking settings to create a template I like, and I finally have something I’ve happy with. It’s just a simple cover art image with a blurred background and some text with the artist and song name. I’ve also put an audio spectrum bar at the bottom that reacts to the music that’s being played.

Now that I’ve got a solid template build, I can update the Youtube channel. I’ve been uploading visualizer videos of all my past covers, as well as my original music, and I’ve been giving the front page of it a refresh. The idea was to make it less barren when people show up to look into my music.

Obviously I want people coming to the website as much as possible, but they might be hesitant to do that is the YouTube page isn’t super top notch. So, I took some of the incredible photos taken by Ary during out last photoshoot, and I updated my profile picture and my dashboard banner. I think the result looks pretty spiffy.