Editing to beat of music
Can anyone share a basic workflow for editing to the beat of the music? I'm not trying to do an elaborate music video or anything, I just want my cuts to occur on the beat. Is this done by placing markers in the Viewer while listening to the music? I'm sure this is an advanced skill, but what would be a technique to get me started? Thanks in advance for any advice.
One follow-up question:
Ken Stone's tutorial stresses the importance of using an NTSC monitor when editing to the beat of music. I'm still doing "homegrown" projects so use my MacBook Pro without an external monitor. Will the rhythm of my editing to music be "off" if I don't have an external monitor? I know it is ideal to have one, just wondering if it is imperative? Or, can I just hook up to a regular tv set from my home?
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Jeffxmusic wrote:
Can I use Garage band (garage band '11) to edit my own original music that I have stored in my itunes library?
http://www.bulletsandbones.com/GB/GBFAQ.html#importfromitunes
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I have a beginner's question, since I've never used Final Cut Express before. Is it possible to do totally frame accurate editing, so that you can edit video perfectly in-time with music? Can you zoom into the video timeline and see each individual frame, and move an edit point to line up with a beat?
Hi Ian, I use the same technique as Michel and it works pretty well.
You don't have to hit m at every beat, but having a regular and continuos set of markers in a section of audio, helps you to decide later which marker to use to sync your video. Obviously, I use markers on the audio clip, not on the timeline, so they are bound to it.
About precision: it's possible to go out of sync, but it's easy enough to be precise if you listen your music carefully. I guess another factor for precision may be the Mac responsivness: faster systems allow to be more precise than slower ones (I saw a big improvement moving from older Macs to my new MacBook Pro).
In any case I agree with you: too many cuts may become boring or distracting. In fact, I sometimes use this technique to conclude a movie with a lively rithmic music: then I sync a selection of stills and/or short clips to the music just before the movie end. At most one minute, usually no more than that.
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I am currently working on a short video that needs to be timed to music. Obviously in some respects, a tool like Final Cut or Premier would be more suited to the task in certain ways, but for reasons of the technical specification of the output, it has to be done in After Effects.
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This is obviously of limited utility, because although the beat does coincide with one of the peaks of the waveform, it's not apparent from looking at it which one it would be. It's also not quite possible to ascertain the exact frame on which the beat happens using this method, as each peak is several frames long and includes several elements of the audio.
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So instead, I hold down the Ctrl button and scrub. This kinda works, but the playback of the audio is quite choppy and discontiguous. As such it's hard to get a sense of each frame as part of the song, and even if I do hear a beat it's hard to recognize it as such (this technique works better in Final Cut somehow, for some reason it manages to scrub while sounding less discontiguous). So then what I do is I stop on a frame I think might possibly be the beat, and I hold Ctrl and Left Click on the playhead, which loops a short segment (five frames?) of the audio. Then I do the same for a few frames before and afterward, just to make sure I targeted the right frame. Now, finally, I have the marker in the right place for a single beat.
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