Uploaded May 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago

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This is a life hack for those of you who make your own video assets and loops for VJing / live visuals. I've been working a lot in Blender (and After Effects) to make my own visuals and months ago I asked myself if my renders could have a standard framerate, tempo, and duration that would make it easy to play at different speeds, without having the frames stutter from slowing down or running too short when speeding up. Using some simple math, we can arrive at reliable numbers and easily calculate where to place keyframes for animations. This is all mostly assuming you're busking for EDM and it's in 4/4 time signature.

Once you fully wrap your head around what I've explained, you will know how many musical measures and beats your renders are, regardless of what frame rate and tempo you choose. This knowledge is especially useful when using BPM sync on your clips in Resolume Avenue or Arena @ResolumeVJSoftware

For my advanced VJ nerds: here are some useful equations to synchronize your oscillators in Blender & After Effects to a BPM:

Blender
2*pi*1/fps*bpm/60

Paste this into the Phase Multiplier setting of the "Built-in Function" F-Curve Modifier in Blender's Graph Editor view. By default, Phase Multiplier is set to "1.000". After pasting the equation (you typed in your own fps and bpm right?) you can multiply or divide the resulting number by multiples of 2 for faster or slower oscillation that still stays on beat.

After Effects
bpm= "insert bpm";
fps= "insert fps";
amp= "insert amplitude";
mid= "insert middle value";
tempo= "insert tempo (e.g. 1/16)";
phase= "insert phase (e.g. Math.PI/2)";
Math.sin(time*2*Math.PI*bpm/fps*tempo+phase)*amp+mid

Remember that one cycle = 2*pi.

You're welcome.

Music: downstate.bandcamp.com/track/sega-flash-vol-5

Oh, and if you wanna see a recording from the show I was preparing visuals for, here's that too: youtu.be/JLhUipXlUqg

#resolume #blender #vjloops