My featured stock music item this week is Positive Perspective. It's another one of those simple, pleasant background tracks for presentations, explainer videos and the like.
The podcasting project I was talking about over the last couple of weeks is temporarily stalled. I hope we can get it off the ground and start production this week. (Fingers crossed.)
I think I may have mentioned at some point in the past an idea to take some of the stuff I never released and put it out someplace under the banner of "Lost Decades." I've been going through some of the stuff I had from the 2000s and punched them up a little bit. So I plan this week into getting ASCAP clearance to exempt Bandcamp from publishing royalties so I can put them out there. Assuming all goes well. I also envision doing the same for stuff from this decade and the 1980s. I'll give further updates as I go.
I also intend to work on some new podcast intros, this time in the "lifestyle" or society/culture category, and maybe some other things as well.
Now I want to give a quick mention to the new video I uploaded to YouTube for my recent stock music item Realize The Dream. If you haven't seen it, please check out this blog post. It features a looped animation of my logo spinning on a 3D globe. I like it, but it was quite a hassle to put together. Let me explain...
I saw a bit of information about Microsoft Paint 3D having a new feature. It now allows you to save your projects as simple animations. Sounded great! So I spent some time figuring out how to create one. First, I was able to import a copy of my logo and make it a sticker. That was actually pretty easy.
Where it got tricky was getting the animation right. First I had to fix it so the canvas would not appear in the animation. Making the canvas transparent was not enough; I had to hide the thing entirely. I would have thought making the canvas transparent would have done the job, but no. Not very intuitive.Then there was a lot of playing to get the globe centered correctly. How did I know it wasn't centered? My logo wobbled! After some work, I got that resolved.
Saving it turned out to be a hassle too. The first time I tried to save it to MP4, Paint 3D crashed! I restarted Paint 3D and was able to save it successfully. However, it changed the dimensions of the video to something different than the original dimensions of the canvas (why? beats me!) so that when I tried to import it into Mixcraft 8 Pro to to add the music and text, it was very slow. When I tried to drag it across the timeline to loop it, Mixcraft crashed.
After having that happen a few times (Grrrr....), I remembered that I have some video software that I rarely use. I imported the MP4 file into that and exported it back out to Windows Media (WMV) with 1280-by-720 resolution. I was then able to import that into Mixcraft and it worked like a champ. I hope Microsoft will continue working on the animation to improve, because I do think the results were pretty neat in the end. It beats just looking at a static logo for three minutes.
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