The Dominik Side of Tumblr

I tried out nearest neighbor scaling on some of these gifs, particularly the last three loops. Compared to bicubic or bilinear, it seems to preserve details better than the others. This also meant that I had to make my gifs more lossy to counteract the increase in file size, as gifs over 3 MB won’t play on Tumblr.

I can see a tinge of noise in the dark anchor gifs that I used nearest neighbor scaling in, but the fog and god rays don’t have - as I’d call them - distracting “colour patches”. If you look at the sky in the first gif below, you might notice how the lightning effect causes the sky to “bounce” - for lack of better words, since bicubic makes colours appear in layers, these layers in the upper-left are pushed upwards due to the light generated by the lightning. 

The noise in the nearest neighbor gifs is a distraction of its own, though I find this less noticeable than the patches and a fair trade-off for better details.On the other hand, the bicubic gifs (like the first gif below) have less noise and were easier to work with.  

I should also add that this benefit may not apply to all images, but may serve best in situations where specular and volumetric effects, such as sparkly spells and fog, respectively, are in abundance.

This is my first foray into Adobe After Effects. I learned A LOT from this little project of mine, not least of which is the synchronization of effects to the beat of the music (thank you, keyframe assistant!). Also, I made the colourful background by heavily editing a video of ice stuck to a stick above a river. You can see a still of the video below.