Backgrounds and artwork behind your visualizer

A visualizer on a black background is a widget. The same visualizer over cover art, a photo or your own footage is a piece of content. The difference is almost entirely in what sits behind it — and in keeping the two from fighting each other.

Four kinds of background

Transparent

No background at all. The checkerboard you see in the editor is showing you which pixels will be see-through. Export as WebM and you get a real alpha channel to drop over footage in your editor — the most flexible option, and the one to pick if the visualizer is an element in a larger edit rather than the whole video. See the transparent export guide.

Note that MP4 cannot carry transparency. Choosing MP4 with a transparent background fills it black on export.

Solid colour

The most underrated option. A single considered colour behind a white visualizer looks deliberate in a way a stock photo rarely does, it compresses cleanly, and it keeps text perfectly legible. If you are unsure what to do, a dark desaturated colour and white bars is very hard to get wrong.

Gradient

Two colours blended. More visual interest than flat colour at no cost to legibility.

One caveat: large smooth gradients are where video compression shows banding — visible steps where there should be a smooth blend. If you see it after uploading, raise the export bitrate rather than changing the gradient.

Image

Cover art, a photo, a still. The obvious choice for a music release, and the one that needs the most care, because a busy image and a busy visualizer compete directly.

• Blur it. The background image has a blur control for exactly this. A blurred photo reads as atmosphere; a sharp one reads as clutter behind your content.
• Drop the opacity. Somewhere around 60–80% lets the image sit back.
• Check the busiest region, not the calmest. White bars that work over the dark part of a photo will disappear over the bright part.

Using your own video as the background

Load a video file rather than audio and the footage renders underneath the visualizer, with its own audio driving the spectrum. Two controls matter:

• Opacity — dimming the footage slightly makes the visualizer legible without hiding what is behind it.
• Blur — heavy blur turns any footage into a moving gradient, which is often more useful than the footage itself.

The aspect ratio is matched to the video automatically when it loads, so a vertical clip opens a vertical project rather than being cropped into a horizontal frame.

Keeping the visualizer legible

One principle covers nearly every case: the background should be lower contrast than the visualizer. Whatever you put back there, it needs to be quieter than the thing in front of it.

The levers, in the order worth reaching for:

1. Blur the background. Removes detail without removing colour or mood.
2. Lower its opacity. Pushes it back behind the visualizer.
3. Keep the visualizer white. White composites over anything; a coloured visualizer only works against the colours you chose it for.
4. Move the visualizer. Drag it to a calmer part of the frame rather than fighting a busy centre — hold Alt while dragging to place it freely.

Layer order

Bottom to top, what the export composes each frame from:

1. Background fill — transparent, solid or gradient
2. Background image, if set
3. Source video, if you loaded one and left it visible
4. The visualizer
5. Text overlay

Worth knowing because a background image and a source video can both be present — the video sits on top of the image, so the image only shows where the video does not reach.

Try it with your artwork →