A full day of work on the music videos for my old Amiga games. First, I added a feature to Prometheus to export the notes (in float format: 0 for the lowest possible note, 1 for the highest), and volumes of each note. This might be useful for future videos.
Then created two new 3D objects, a top-less, bottom-less cube, and a cube with oversized faces which makes it easy to make a neon 'glowing' cube. Then, lots of experiments to get a look for these videos. One had a spinning cube object in the centre and web of hollow neon cubes, each inside the other. These spinning cubes lit up with each note on one of the four Protracker tracks. Alas, pretty though it was, it was also overwhelming and confusing. Many notes are trigged a lot, and some sustained notes are hardly ever triggered, so the images didn't really match the music, as well as being too bright and too flashy.
Simpler was better. I remembered the nice effect from 'Joy From a Machine Code Perspective'. This evoked the look of Protracker, so I re-created the look using an image from the Protracker I remember. I added a spinning cube in the middle with the game title page, and added a neon cage.
I can change the colours per title. The whole thing swirls and moves like a rollercoaster. It is pretty, but I expect it will be largely be the same for each tune. This is perhaps best, as 40 videos will be a huge amount of work if each is customised too finely. I also thought today that it might be better if these videos were on my music channel rather than my Cornutopia Software channel. This is primarily music after all, and perhaps a few people who remember those old games might discover my contemporary music. These are 'official' music videos, and there is no channel for Scorpius Software, so they may be out of place alongside my PC game trailers.
This means, however, that these videos must appear after Nightfood, so in 2027. This gives me more time to tweak and refine these. The raw rendering, conversion, uploading may take more than a day in pure computing terms, such is the effort of creating frame-by-frame Argus videos.
I have a lot of folders to create, a lot of images, a lot of Thumbnails, a lot of YouTube text to format.
My father remains in a distant hospital, still apparently sedated. The house feels eerily quiet. We are awaiting his transfer to our local hospital, which will make a visit much easier.
