With the effects of COVID-19, making music videos in a traditional manner has been difficult, but you can still wind up with a strong product using an online service called Rotor.
WordPlay T. Jay used this service for the first time for a song titled “Breathe With Me,” which is an On The Map Music Group production about the ongoing pandemic.
Rotor essentially uses AI to analyze a track, then gives you the option to add video clips, a style and text to the video.
TuneCore and CDBaby subscribers get 10 percent off of the service (only one discount can be used). A standard definition video costs $18, and a High Definition video costs $25.
“I hoped to use this to produce something decent to share with the public for the song and for advertisements,” T. Jay said. “Good quality video production is still expensive these days, even with our technology, so this is an alternative.”
Rotor uses a four-step process:
1. Upload your song. T. Jay recommends using the best quality version possible. He used a .wav version over an .mp3 version, as the latter can get crunched down during upload and lose sound quality.
2. Choose your clips. There are topics gathered you may peruse, or there is a search bar where you can input keywords you think would bring up clips relevant to your song. For example, for “Breathe With Me,” T. Jay searched terms like masks, pandemic, COVID, urban, etc. He wound up with 46 clips throughout a song lasting 3:59.
3. Choose a style. T. Jay used a cinematic style for his video, but there are many other options to choose from, such as church, FX pusher, washed, etc.
4. Choose text. There were multiple options for text additions, but T. Jay wasn’t too interested in text for this video. Ultimately, he said if he wanted to add text, he would rather download the video and add text with Adobe Premier Pro after the fact.
“I don’t know if I would use this for full music videos, but I do think it would be great for lyrics videos,” T. Jay said. “It’s all up to you and what your needs are.”
To see the layout of the site and hear more about Rotor, check out the video below.