Video effects?

[Synthoid]

Where can I find a program that will generate colorful swirly and kaleidoscope-type patterns for a video background?

[Sharp]

Hi Synthoid.

I use SwishMax 3 for all my FLASH programming and Animation. It's a program much like Macromedia Flash but they all export the animations you make in an array of formats.

In this case, you would want the AVI output from the program.

For what your after though it's total overkill. If all you want is that video background I'd rather just make it for you and in such a way that it is only a few seconds long and can be seamlessly looped in your video program.

Regards
Sharp,

[Timo]

Or you could use something like WinAmp visualisations, which are sound activated, and then capture the result (AVI format) using something like Fraps or the like.

Hundreds of free WinAmp visualisations on their site.

http://www.winamp.com/visualizations/visualizations/1

The level of graphic effect complexity, resolution and frames-per-second lies entirely on your graphics cards' capabilities though, as it's all generated in realtime. You can't render it offline/batch, as it were.

[Synthoid]

you could use something like WinAmp visualisations, which are sound activated, and then capture the result (AVI format) using something like Fraps or the like.

That is close to what I'm looking for--could I play a song in Media Player, capture that visualization and later post it with the same song as a video on YouTube?

I'm not familiar with "Fraps" though, is it easy to use?

[Timo]

That is close to what I'm looking for--could I play a song in Media Player, capture that visualization and later post it with the same song as a video on YouTube?

Absolutely. Some of the visualisations in WinAmp are extremely good, and others not so, depending on the talents of whoever programmed them. You have a choice of hundreds/thousands, and they're all free.

I'm not familiar with "Fraps" though, is it easy to use?

Well actually I just tried Fraps with Winamp, but it crashed WinAmp each time it started recording. - Fraps is usually used for recording games without any lag, so it seems either my graphics card is throwing up some particular compatibility problem with running Winamp and Fraps simultaneously (games and Fraps work fine for me) or I need to use different graphic settings in Winamp. As such, Fraps may work with you. Perhaps worth a go anyhow. http://www.fraps.com Unfortunately the demo displays a watermark, though, which you can only remove via buying the program.

However I've just tried another trick I have up my sleeve - [CamStudio] - which is entirely free (no watermark or other limitations), and it's captured it nicely. Unlike Fraps which utilises the GPU/graphics card, CamStudio requires CPU. So you need a good graphics card to generate the more complex visualisations in WinAmp, and a reasonable CPU to record it via CamStudio.

Use the lossless codec within CamStudio for fast, artefact-free video capture. This also has the benefit of being able to import the capture into a video editor such as Adobe Premiere Pro or After Effects for editing afterwards should you wish.

Seeing as YouTube uses 640x360 as standard (non HQ), there's no point capturing the Winamp visualisation at full screen as your GPU and CPU will be doing work they don't need to. - So to optimise for faster FPS (frames per second) and maximise performance simply resize the visualisation to approximate the size of YouTube's display window (or slightly larger if you want to give yourself a few pixels leeway) from within WinAmp, and then just capture the screen area you need using CamStudio.

CamStudio has a capture "Fixed Region" option available. So enter '640x360' as the box dimensions and when you're ready, hit Record and place the 640x360 box where you want it (over the WinAmp visualisation) and Bob's your uncle's brother's family-friend's pet dog.

Camstudio will also capture windows audio, which is great as it keeps it all sync'd.

When capturing in lossless format, the captured file sizes will be huge, though (we're talking gigabytes [GB] here) - as they are in raw AVI format. But you could try other output formats within CamStudio if you don't want to edit it afterwards, or you can use a converter to convert it to whatever Youtube video format is the best for you. Or Youtube may offer an option to convert it for you when you upload it.

http://winamp.com
http://winamp.com/visualizations/visualizations/1
http://camstudio.org
http://fraps.com