I charged into music video work today. The animated subtitles in Christmas Smells and The Dusty Mirror tracks are a definite step up compared to previous videos, so I aim to add these to every music video now. I must at least create subtitles for the 13 Violet Night tracks, plus some for the new video for 'A.I.' from TEATB, and the new B-Side 'I Can Heal'.
First step is to save out the structure of the song, then place a note at the start of each line, so that the frame when the lines are sung can be calculated. This list of frame numbers, one per line, is then saved. This can be used in Argus for a per-note import. Then, to create bitmap images for each lyric line. These are saved with alpha in DDS format. Each video needs 10-30 such lines.
Today I've created over 150 such images for the 7 music videos worked on today (this is the most tedious part of the process). These look much better than cheap automatic subtitles added by YouTube. The font and style match the album, but more than that, the words appear just before the line is coming, then prettily float away when the line is gone. My subtitles are useful as well as pretty.
After that's done, I create an animation in Argus of the full music video, and set each line to appear at the specified frame. It's all a lot of work, one or two days can do all of the subtitles on an album. Any other animation can easily be added at this point.
The new video for the old song 'A.I.' used an 'addition' effect, so there's no black line around the text, but it's still readable.
Money is such a struggle at the moment. Everything is such a struggle, and I'm making things with little goal other than an obsession to make things as best I can. This is at least something. I should be able to finish these basic subtitles tomorrow, all ready to add some sort of proper video behind them, as and when needed.
