Making of the video for "Suppressed" (and why it took so long)

As you may know from the previous post. I wanted to do something beautiful and animated to put my album "Suppressed" on YouTube.

So I decided to do two things:

1. Create a continuous mix of the tracks, adding some freshness to the sound and how the tracks play (and overlap) together. I had some ideas how I'd play the tracks in a DJ set, where I'd want to have transitions etc.

2. Create an animated visualizer based on the original cover art to accompany the music - since it's  video format I want to have some moving image content.

The first iteration of the mix turned out to be too aggressive and cluttered and I had to add some space between a few tracks. I initially tried to make every single transition as tight as possible - it wasn't a good idea. Silence or near silence is also a very much needed sound in the music. In the second iteration I added some pauses, I've let some fade-outs sound off and added some new transition sounds based on the original music. Hence the mix now is a slightly different experience form the album - and I like that. It's not something anyone could make. It's an artistic interpretation of the album.

For the visualizer - I first considered making the icosahedron rotate slowly in the background. However - I've realized it doesn't look good from every angle. Some angles look unbalanced and skewed:

Another problem was - to make a looping animation I'd have to rotate the cage by 360° in one axis. To make it appropriately slow to and heavy I would probably have to render a good few thousand frames on the GPU. Each one could take 30 minutes. That'd take months to render just for the cage - and the energy ball inside would also have to be animated. All in all - I ditched this idea as unrealistic.

I still wanted to have some motion so I decided to make the energy orb in the center move. It was created using Blender Cycles' volumetrics, and a combination of some procedural textures. It was easy to animate  that - I just had to shift around the texture coordinates.

I had to duplicate that setup and add a crossfade to be able to have a seamless loop. Rendering unique frames for the whole album was not an option. Rendering a 600-frame loop took a whole day of rendering non-stop on my Nvidia GTX 1060. Then I realized my loop is moving way to fast.

I needed a slower, smoother motion. Otherwise its going to look ridiculous and steal attention from the music. I wasn't sure how I'm gonna solve this yet...

Separately, I've been experimenting with a a ring-shaped spectrum analyzer visualization with Animation Nodes add-on for Blender. I've rendered out a white shape on black background using OpenGL Animation rendering in Blender - which was very fast, and gave me 105 000 frames of the spectrum analysis ring ready in just a few hours.  So I had this part done!

I initially wanted to do compositing of this animation in Natron, just like the original cover art was done - I used the original Natron project.

However that's a very heavy project and Natron wasn't very stable with it. I then slowed down the orb animation. However I saw that it's going to lead to ugly blending between frames. I tried to mask that by adding spatially displaced time offset to mask the lack of intermediary frames, as I've stretched the animation. It seemed to work well - the frame blending became unnoticeable. A healthy bit of film grain masked the rest of the distortion, making it look perfectly smooth.

It however made Natron very unstable and caused my PC to crash dozens of times while trying to render anything.

I've left off everything but the energy orb animation. I would be able to recrate everything else in Blender Compositor. I had to somehow loop the noise-distorted time offset. I managed to make the noise crossfade with a time-offset copy of itself for a seamless loop (not a trival task!). Then I duplicated the whole setup three times, sequenced one after another to loop the whole thing seamlessly, and cut a single 20 000-frame long loop out of the middle. I was only hoping nothing would break with the loop, as any sudden motion would break the loop illusion and simply destroy the effect I was going for.

I managed to render that out with much hassle, as I bumped into another problem in Natron - it would render ~80 frames in each run and stall.  I soon realized I will not be able to use Natron for the whole project if I ever hit a similar issue.

I managed to render out the loop finally. So this component was done too.

Now I had to recreate the whole cover in Blender. I wasn't using Blender Compositor a lot since I've learned Natron last year, because Natron felt way faster and full-featured. However stability was key here.

Here's how the final NodeTree looks in Blender:

I've brought everything here back together. The static cage, the animated energy orb, the unfa logo and album title (which by the way is written in my own font that I designed with Inkscape and FontForge). Then after the basic stuff came the animated spectrum analyzer ring. I decided to color it using the hues of the energy ball - I've rendered a bitmap for that purpose and used that to color the rings and their glow. That nicely glued the rings with the cover art.

I've realized that the glow from the frequency analyzer ring should also illuminate the text in the background - so I added this too. It makes the whole composition feel a bit more physical and real.

One small thing was the film grain. Natron has dedicated tools for that, with amazing amount of flexibility. Blender however... has a colorful FBM noise texture.

With some texture mapping animation and careful scaling I managed to get a usable film grain out of it. Too bad YouTube's compression smears that off anyway...

I have also added some fade ins-outs to introduce different elements of the composition with a delay - I tried to make it work with the first track's (Zynthetic) intro to build up and then show all glory on the bass drop. It seems to have worked out fine. I had no test render to see if this stuff works. It was all or nothing...

The final rendering took place between 05.04.2018 and 17.04.2018 - mostly 24/7 rendering on a Ryzen 7 1700 CPU.  I have took apart my PC case to have better cooling. I have slept with stoppers in my ears, to not
hear the CPU fan hum.

After that was done, what was left is putting together all the PNG frames and FLAC audio together, and uploading it to YouTube.

Then I've realized I've set a bad naming scheme for my frames and they will not be recognized in any software as a single frame sequence.

I've had only 4 digits on the first frames. I should have had 6 digits on all of them. I had to write a Bash script to rename the frames for me so they are all 6-digit numbers.

I first tried using Kdenlive, but it didn't manage to chew 105000 frames in one sequence. Blender was about to save me again.

And I was really surprised how little of a flip was given by Blender when I selected 105000 frames and imported them into the Video Sequence Editor.

I knew upsampling video to 4K is a good way to force YouTube to throw a higher bitrate for my content, and I wanted people to be able to enjoy my tasty film grain.

I've rendered the project with the Pulverize PHP script. I've uploaded a partially rendered MKV file to YouTube to test if it works. It was available in 4K, everything was fine. It looked gorgeous - I've never seen the final effect of all this work before moving to music. I've listened to a short clip of "Zynthetic" over and over. it was in a middle of a Tuesday/Wednesday night, I should have gone to sleep long time ago to get up for work. I was so happy that it works, that I managed to pull this off. I couldn't go to sleep.

I could have messed up so much stuff along the way, but the final rendering was flawless. The animation synced perfectly to the music. The animated energy ball flowed smoothly and seamlessly. The lighting effects were beautiful and the animated fade-ins were timed great.

In the Wednesday morning I woke up and it was rendered. I had a single MKV file. Ready to upload. I've started the upload and went on with my day. I've been checking the upload progress remotely.

It was done around 5 PM. When I came back home I sat down to add a track listing and a description. I also wondered what cover image I should make. I decided to use a frame from the video that looks the most similar to the original cover art, to not spoil the cool animated rings of plasma that are there. I like surprising people.

One think I am not fully happy with is that YouTube didn't encode a 4K version. So my plan to get a higher bitrate and show off the detail failed. I don't know why, because the short test upload worked great. I hoped it's going to come online in the next days, as it can take a while to reencode such a huge video - but it didn't. I'm not going to re-upload it though. Maybe if I file an issue, YouTube will fix this.

Anyway - fro now I'm left with quite a lot of leftover stuff on my disk form this project, and I'm not sure what to do with that:

That's it for now. Let me know if you've enjoyed this type of written content. If you did - I might do more.

Thank you all for your continued support. I've got a lot of projects in the works, but as you probably know from your own experience - finishing stuff is the hardest part.

I'll see you soon.
In the meantime - go and make some music :)
- unfa