10 years of my Best Animations

[DaveOB]

I've been using Magic in combination with Photoshop and DaVinci Resolve for about 10 years to make videos for my production music catalogue. There are also some tracks from my old rock band Reactor. All of the tracks here are published by Audio Network Ltd and can be licensed from them. Hope you like!


Boiling Point - graphics created in Photoshop and animated within Magic using track stems

Dream of The Ancients - This one took ages! Various parts made using Photoshop layers and all animated elements created in Magic

Exotica – a mixture of Magic animation with Photoshop work and Ai elements

Nightshade – super simple but effective 3 element animation

Promises – Amp in background animated in Magic

Hunted – Nasty audio controlled slide show and FX!

Cage Fight – VU meter and spinning record animated in Magic

Jewel of the East – Trying to build a player I can use on lots of tracks

Real – Assembled in Magic

Time machine – clock hands animated in Magic

Realisation – circular Spectrogram

Between Worlds – simple animation in complex time signature

Golden Dragon – recycled amp in background

Rust Belt – more VU fun

Don't Think – Level meters from magic

All I need Is You - Level meters and camera movement from magic

Kama Sutra – Amplifier in background

Cursed – built my own Oscillograph

Roar – Lots of photoshop work and tweaking to build VU meters

Float – very simple VU meter over video

Devil's Canyon – Just stock footage and some animation but the heat haze took ages!

Hostile Intent – loud!

Rusty Saw – homemade spectrum analyzer

Throne of Blood – flame pillar spectrum analyzer

Silken Shroud – Same technique as 'Nightshade' but with video

Mystery train – simple but enigmatic

Desolate – super simple spooky atmos

[Magic]

This is really great. Thanks so much for sharing! Which one do you like the best?

[DaveOB]

Thank you so much! The first two on the list (Boiling Point and Dream of The Ancients) took a ridiculous amount of work so I'm happy I got through them I think Boiling Point is probably the coolest overall.

Some of the simple ones are pretty pleasing though as it's often about finding the most appropriate thing for the music rather than the flashiest design or effect. I feel like Nightshade and Hunted are fairly effective in that way. I have a lot of tracks I need to upload too so it's really helpful to be able to do things which work quickly.

Thank you for making such a fantastic piece of software!

D

[DaveOB]

Forgot to post my YT channel trailer which has a flashy "Thanos effect' intro made in Davinci followed by lots of clips of Magic animations. The green face picture is a photo of me taken by my wife with a long exposure and a laser pointer!

[skarabee]

Thank you for sharing this. Really cool music inside, "promises" and "real" already catched me , will listen to all the stuff!

[DaveOB]

Thank you very much! Really enjoyed recording those tracks

[TKS]

Some really cool visualizations that all go perfectly with the music.

My favorites are "Dream of The Ancients" and "Realisation", they’re just perfect in their simplicity.
How is the latter realized?
I'd love to try something like that for my quieter songs...

[DaveOB]

Some really cool visualizations that all go perfectly with the music.

My favorites are "Dream of The Ancients" and "Realisation", they’re just perfect in their simplicity.
How is the latter realized?
I'd love to try something like that for my quieter songs...

Thank you very much TKS 'Realisation' is a bit more complex (and GPU hungry) than it appears.

It's essentially 2 audio to image modules (1 for each channel) going into FFT spectograms. These are then scaled, moved and run through Circle Wrap Distortion, 3D rotate and City Lights. I experimented with Antialias modules to smooth some of the jagged edges but this is where it gets much too unwieldy for my ageing GPU. You may have better luck with this if your system is newer than mine.

I'll attach the file below so you can fiddle around with it. I found that bypassing the Antialias modules allowed me to tune up the effect for the specific piece of music. I then switched them back on just for the final render.

From memory I think anything which was bypassed in the saved project can probably be removed, but if this doesn't look right you can always experiment with activating the final antialias module. Apologies if this makes your computer levitate around the room on it's cooling fans!

Hope it works for you...