Magic Music Visuals

Hello! I recently picked up Magic because it seemed like something that would help expedite the creation of videos so I can upload my music to YouTube. It's been working great so far, aside from a few learning experiences, and while I still need to work on a few things, I'm really happy with where things are going.
Here's a breakdown of what I've got going on:

The background is its own scene, so I can change it to fit the mood. In this case, I had some footage from a game that inspired the music I made, so I threw it in there and added a few filters.

The boxes that separate the visual elements are just a PNG image created in GIMP. The black parts are partially transparent so you can see the background through them. They, along with the spectrum and waveform displays, are grayscale so I can use nodes to color them to fit the mood.

I do a lot of video game covers and arrangements for fun, so I put a space for the game's title in the bottom right. For original tracks, I'll use my spinning J64 logo. (Technically, I should have used one here since this track wasn't actually used in the game, but I'm still getting the kinks worked out.)

The middle area is for information about the track, like the title, the original composer if it's an arrangement, what sample libraries were used, or whatever.

The spinning J64 logo is still a work in progress. Right now it's a holdover from my previous template made in Blender. The music box was a fun idea, but it kinda wastes time, both in terms of getting to the music and actually getting the video made. I'll be re-rendering the logo without the base for the final version of this template.

Originally the spinning logo was a sequence of transparent PNG images so I could overlay them on top of whatever background visual I had. Magic doesn't let you do this with PNG images at this time, so I had to convert them to JPG. Since JPG doesn't support transparency I also had to extract the alpha channels and convert those to JPG, then use Magic's Mask node to combine the two. During this process, I also learned that Magic doesn't read numbered file names correctly if they aren't padded with zeroes, so instead of the expected 1, 2, 3...9, 10, 11...99, 100, it was going 1, 10, 11...19, 100, 2, 20, 21, etc.

And that's where I'm at so far! Any feedback or suggestions would be appreciated as I feel like I still have plenty I could learn.

Looks nice! I think you did a very good job. Thanks for sharing.

Originally the spinning logo was a sequence of transparent PNG images so I could overlay them on top of whatever background visual I had. Magic doesn't let you do this with PNG images at this time, so I had to convert them to JPG. Since JPG doesn't support transparency I also had to extract the alpha channels and convert those to JPG, then use Magic's Mask node to combine the two. During this process, I also learned that Magic doesn't read numbered file names correctly if they aren't padded with zeroes, so instead of the expected 1, 2, 3...9, 10, 11...99, 100, it was going 1, 10, 11...19, 100, 2, 20, 21, etc.

Magic's VideoFile module supports transparency / alpha channels, so you might want to look into some formats/codecs that will let you use it. Here is a post that might be a helpful starting point: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=88&p=1787

Thanks for the tip, Eric! I figured I might have missed something somewhere, and it looks like I was right. I looked through the different video output formats in Blender and didn't find any that supported alpha, but it turns out I was only selecting the container format when I needed to select a different codec as well. That will help out a lot since I can keep the animation in a single file, and I won't have to worry about padding frame numbers with zeroes.

EDIT: Used this new information to render a new logo to use.



EDIT 2: Tweaked it a bit further, changed to a 60-band bar-style spectrum. Now I just need to figure out how to make good backgrounds for when I don't have pre-recorded video to use...