Colour that follows the music

Colour follows the music is one switch on every visualizer. Turn it on and the colours move with the part of the song you choose, in the way you choose: the whole look, or just one of its parts, such as the snow of a Christmas look, the lights of a city or the bars of a spectrum.

The colour is worked out from the song itself, frame by frame, so the preview, a still, the browser export and a render made on our servers all show the same colour at the same moment. A look keeps its own shading and detail: only the colour moves.

• Open the Classic editor
• Open Studio

Choose one under Follows:

• The whole song's energy: how loud and full the song is from moment to moment, so the colour rises into the chorus and settles in the quiet parts.
• The bass: the kick and the bassline, the lowest part of the sound.
• The low mids: the body of the song: warm synths, guitars and the lower voices.
• The high mids: the presence of the song: vocals, leads and snares.
• The highs: the top of the sound: hi-hats, cymbals, air and sparkle.
• The beat: each beat the song's analysis finds, so the colour lands on the beat.
• The brightness of the sound: whether the sound is dark and deep or bright and sharp at that moment, even at the same loudness.
• The song's sections: the song's parts (verse, chorus, bridge) as its analysis marks them: a sweep gives each kind of part its own colour from your list, and a flash fires as each new part begins.

Choose one under How, then set its Strength (how far the colour moves at the song's peak):

• Sweep between colours: the colour moves through two to four colours you pick as what it follows rises, from the first colour when it is quiet to the last at its peak. Start from a palette (Neon, Sunset, Ocean, Fire and Prism) or pick each colour yourself.
• Turn the hue: the colours you already chose keep their shading and turn around the colour wheel as what it follows rises, up to the amount you set (as far as 360 degrees, a full circle).
• Flash a colour: the colour you pick flashes in when what it follows hits (on the beat, a bass hit or a jump in the highs) and fades back to the look's own colour.

In Classic, the whole look's colour is under Settings, Visualizer Controls, Colour. Each of the look's own layers in Settings, Visualizer Layers (its snow, its lights, its title, its background) has its own Colour follows the music, so the snow can flash red on the beat while the lights sweep with the bass. A part with its own setting follows that one; the rest follow the whole look's.

In Studio, select a layer and open its settings in the inspector: the whole look and each of its parts have the same switch. Smart audio binding chooses a colour for the layer's style as well, and taking the smart binding back removes it again.

A colour that follows the music is part of the look: it is saved with the project, copied with Send to and Paste look, kept by templates, packs and every clip of a Timeline, and drawn the same way in every export.

Background Motion shows the switch on each visualizer layer; Motion graphics in Customize, and Open in Classic carries it over; the Screensaver under Settings on each look in the rotation, and a look you save with it plays the same way on the Stream; Generate visualizer on each visualizer layer over your picture; and Layer assets on each look's settings.

Playlist's Club night package sweeps its colours with the bass on every song. Make a Music Video reads it from your words: say "the colours follow the bass" or "flash on the beat" and the visualizer shots follow the music in your video's palette.

• Build a playlist
• Make a screensaver

Projects made before this update may use the older colour shift (Color Frequency), which reached only some visualizers. They open and play exactly as they did, and the older settings stay under Visualizer Controls, Older colour shift. Change anything in Colour follows the music and the project moves over to it in that same change: the older setting carries on as the whole look's colour, now on every part, and the older control switches off so nothing is coloured twice.

Every colour that follows the music is flash-guarded: never more than three flashes a second, however strong you set it, so the video stays safe for people sensitive to flashing light. A flash the guard holds back stays a faint change until the next one is allowed, and a sweep or a hue turn that would jump on a sudden hit (a sweep from black to white on the beat, say) is held back the same way.

Say it the way you would to a lighting operator. When you build a project: "make a Christmas visualizer where the colours follow the bass", or "start a snowy Christmas video and flash the snow red on every beat". SW Agent opens the look with it already set, on the part you named.

In an open project: "make the colours follow the bass", "flash the snow red on the beat", "let the colour drift with the song", "sweep the colours between blue and pink with the highs", "change the colours with each section" or "stop the colours following the music". The same words work in Classic, in Studio and in SW Agent's editor, each change one step of undo.

Through our MCP server, build_editor_setup opens Classic or Studio with the colour already following the music: give its colour setting your words ("flash the snow red on the beat"), and it reads them against the look's own parts. Words that name no colour, or nothing in the music to follow, are refused with a message that says why.