A bit of vidding meta -- cutting and synching

[marnanightingale]

"What's the great secret to success as a comedia--" "Timing!"

So I was telling someone about how I cut vids, and discovered to my great amazement that possibly not everyone in the world already knows all about working with music and cutting to time and synching to internal movement and like that.

See, I used to do lights for live music acts, and while you won't necessarily learn anything about music doing that, the one thing that you absolutely must learn is how to find the beat of a song within the first few bars and hang onto it for dear life through any number of distractions; the singer can forget a verse, the guitarist can fall over drunk, the drummer can break a stick, somebody can pour cold beer down your back, half of your grid can short out, but you MUST stay on that beat until the end of the song.

And you must be able to take that beat and transform it into a light show that works, on the fly, using whatever lights you've got; it needs to come into your brain as music and come out your fingers as a thing of visual beauty. Ok, as a visual thing that does not suck.

When I started vidding, I think that is the one thing that saw me through any amount of technical ignorance, got me past any number of mistakes, and generally allowed me to pull off a vid I'm still not ashamed of on my first try; I can keep the beat, and I was already predisposed to think of a clip as a collection of variously coloured moving lights, with informational content.

So for what it's worth and with much disclaiming, here is

Ye Olde Lighting Tech's Guide To Cutting And Synching Footage

Disclaimers:

1) If you find an error in this, let me know. Please. I can DO this, but I'm not at all sure how well I can explain it, and I'll take any help I can get.

2) There are other ways to cut vids. If what you're doing works for you, and this is just confusing the issue, please, ignore this.

3) I have no music theory. None. I can't carry a tune and I can't read music, and I don't play an instrument. I have had this checked by people who do understand music, but my basic goal here is to produce a resource for people who lack even the most basic formal training in music. This frequently means I am going to use a long clunky definition where an short, elegant one will do, because I am making a point of sticking to how I -- a visually-oriented, lyrics-focussed, untrained person -- experience and work with music. If you have a bunch of music theory, this may make you crazy.

4) This is not meant to be a tutorial on -- or even a discussion of -- vidding aesthetics. It is only meant to be a fairly clear explanation of a couple of the technical issues beginning vidders face.

That being said, at least two of my betas have pointed out that I can be opinionated and that it sneaks in various places, no matter how many times I chase it out with a broom. Take it for what it's worth...

5) Obviously I think the samples I've chucked in are helpful, but not everybody needs all of them, and there are a fair number. Only one of them is above 1M, however, and most of them are under 500K, so they ought not to take too long to download. They are hosted on my server, so please don't stream them, okay?

I. We Got The Beat

You've probably heard people talk about how vids need to be cut 'to time' or 'to the beat.'

If you, like me, are totally unmusical, that might leave you more confused than you started.

Are you supposed to cut to the vocal, and start each new clip when a new line starts? Except you'll notice fairly quickly that that gives you uneven lengths and draggy bits and weird transitions, and -- I dunno, but it just FEELS wrong, yes? Looks weird...

Ok, how about the guitar? Or the bass line? Maybe the keyboard?

Or, wait -- cut to the beat. That's the drum, right? You beat on drums?

Well, yes, and no. You're going to be paying a lot of attention to drums as you learn to find and cut to the beat, but mostly no. The drum is not the beat. And drummers make mistakes. If the drum were the beat, that wouldn't be possible; 'the beat' would just be whatever they happened to play.

And songs with no drums still have a beat.

The beat is part of the song itself, not part of whatever performance you have a recording of.

The beat is the backbone of the song. It's what holds it together, and once it is established, it never, ever changes.

It doesn't speed up, it doesn't slow down, it doesn't become a different beat -- (at least, not in any piece of music you are likely to be vidding to -- full-length symphonies are another matter, and no meat of mine.)

And that is why you cut to it -- because having that constant rhythm in all the flash and change and shiny is what makes a vid work, just as being on the beat is what makes a dance performance work, or a vocal performance, or anything else which is set to music.

OK, but what is it? The extremely non-technical explanation is this: when you drum your fingers or tap your feet along to a piece of music? That rhythm your body is setting up is the beat.

(If you 'can't keep time' when you do these things, or when you are on a dance floor, if you've tried to learn and just can't find it?
I'm not going to say you can't make vids. As I said, there are other ways to cut vids than the way I do them. But I'm not going to be any use to you at all, because that is how I do it.)

OK, what about the beat?

Two things about it. First, you need to know that the single beats form repeating patterns of more and less stressed beats, called bars or measures. One full pattern is a bar:

ONE two Three four ONE two Three four ONE two Three four ONE two Three four ONE two Three four

or

ONE two three ONE two three ONE two three

Or whatever.

The stressed beats make up "the front beat". The unstressed beats are "the backbeat".

(You don't actually need to remember this next part terribly well for itself; it is only here to make the beat thing make sense, so if it's not helping, skip it.)

One bar in 4/4 time is the same duration as one whole note in the same piece of music. That's an arbitrary time, by the way -- there is no 'correct time' for a bar or for a whole note; if you look at sheet music it will give you an indication -- "fast" or "slow" or "lively" just as it will indicate "loud" or "hushed" -- but that's only an indication -- the actual tempo will vary even between performances of the same song.

Chances are, though, that your piece of music doesn't have very many whole notes; a bar can also be made up of

2 half notes
4 quarter notes
8 eighth notes
16 sixteenth-notes
32 thirty-second notes

etc.

Or -- most likely -- a combination of some or all of the above, which is how and why the music can speed up or slow down but a bar is a bar and the beat is the beat is the beat.

It's a bit confusing...

Add to that, each instrument is playing a slightly different set of notes, and the vocalist is singing another set.

It's a lot. That's why you need to be able to find the beat, for the beat will lead you through the wilderness and get you home.

OK, so how does a person find the beat?

Well, I put the song on loop. Then I drum along on my legs. Feel free to stick these samples on loop and do the same.

If you're dealing with straight up 4/4, what you're doing on your legs will sound like this:

ONE two Three four, ONE two Three four, ONE two Three four ...

The backbone of rock and roll, that sound ...

Try it here --

4/4 time:

Kashmir sample

Ignore the guitar. Ignore the vocal. Just follow that drum. Stick this sample on loop and keep going until you've got it.

If what you have is

ONE two ONE two

British Grenadiers

You have 2/4 time. Your basic march -- LEFT Right LEFT Right... with 4/4, you dance. With 2/4, you march. Or, possibly, bop.

Now, there's no drum here until we get halfway through. So where in hell is your beat? It's there -- wait for the second repetition, where the drum kicks in. Now, stick it on loop. See how now you can sort of 'hear' where it OUGHT to be, right from the beginning? That's your beat.

If you have

ONE two three, ONE two three

Log Driver's Waltz

You have a 3/4 beat.

Which is not terribly common in modern music, but I'm all over encouraging the widest possible range of vidding, so I wanted to at least mention it.

This is a fun sample to find the beat on, because 3/4 is trickier than either 4/4 or 2/4.

3/4 means that there are three quarter-notes to a bar.

Because we're so used to 4/4, this tends to make us feel as if something were slightly "off". Our brains want to add extra time onto that heavy beat.

You have ONE two three, ONE two three

And you feel as if you have ONE -- two three, ONE -- two three.

This screws me up every time -- I can waltz, as long as I don't THINK about it.

And you can vid it, as long as you remember that in order to bring the actual length of the beat in line with the perceived length, you'll have to feel your way and tweak and play. But today -- is not that day. Get something a bit more standard under your belt, first.

And finally, if you have

ONE two three Two two three, ONE two three Two two three,

Hallelujah

You have 6/8 time.

Notice that here you have no percussion at all. You have to go hunting ... drum on your leg, dance a little, listen for where it HAS to be. You'll get it.

6/8 has some of the hazards of perception that 3/4 does, but it's not nearly so bad, because you have more time for your ear to even things out.

There are other time signatures. Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill for example, is in 7/4. If you can cope with that, well and good. Me, when I was running light boards I never made it through a cover version of that song without getting myself lost and having to fake it until I could catch up with the beat again at least once.

Now, as a vidder, you aren't running live; you only need to find it once, and you can always go back and keep looking for it again as necessary. It HAS been vidded, and will be again. Possibly not by me, much as I love that song.

While you are learning, you might be best advised to keep things as simple as possible, and that means 4/4.

Ok, you can find a beat now, and you've driven everyone around you insane because you now have a habit of beating out the time on your leg, so you've got used to the idea that what goes in at your ear comes out at your hands. (This may be a good time to warn you that said habit may be incurable, by the way.)

Now we need to take that and make it visual for you; make it something you can SEE as well as hear.

If you can, get ahold of some concert footage. Doesn't really matter what it is; whatever band you like, as long as it's a live performance and it's not a daytime show. If you can, though, get a band known for spectacle, even if they're not your favourite kind of music.

If you're spoilt for choice: Bowie. Queen. Depeche Mode. Pink Floyd. Genesis. Madonna.

All bands who have made an art form of light as an accompaniment to music.

Toss it in the dvd player and listen to the music and drum or dance along. And watch that light show. Watch when it changes, watch the colours, watch how different parts of the stage are highlighted at different times, watch what they do with effects. Drum along on your leg while you watch, or dance.

Watch until you start to KNOW when the next change is coming, when the next bit of flash is due.

Then try a dance performance, or if you can find something of theirs on dvd, Cirque du Soleil is wonderful for this as well. Now you're still watching for all that stuff mentioned above, but you also get to see physical motion synched to music.

It's like a music vid writ large, and it's a lot easier to analyze than either a fanvid or a professional music video, because even at its most sophisticated, live performance is just visually simpler and in, well, bigger print.

OK. You can find the beat, you understand what you're hearing, you can express it with your hands, and you know how to make it visual. Let's get us a song and some source and make a vid.

II. Everybody Get Up And Dance

I am going to talk about 4/4, because that's the one I understand best, so it'll make the best example. I can extrapolate from there and work with other time signatures, but actually explaining it would involve way too much flailing. And once you have 4/4 nailed, you'll be able to extrapolate too, so let's just do that.

As I've said, if you are a new vidder, you should start with a song in 4/4. Fortunately, this describes almost all rock and pop songs and most folk songs. But check. If it isn't 4/4, consider making it your second vid, and finding a different project for your first vid; you'll do more justice to both projects that way.

Also, for your first couple of vids you probably want a studio recording, not a live one; with a studio recording, you can pretty much trust that you're going to have a performance that is on the beat, and at a consistent tempo, and you're not going to be tweaking your timing to compensate for/avoid drawing attention to whatever tiny errors the performers may have made.

Even though we know that the drum is not the beat and the beat is part of the song and not part of the performance, if the performance is off and your work is on, it's going to be your work that looks wrong, and you have to compensate for that.

With a live recording, though it may take awhile for you to find them, the little errors are always there, and they'll trip you. I love vidding to live recordings; Tango has a warmth to it that I wouldn't have gotten had I used a studio recording, but it's not a perfect take: I lost count of the times that I had to tweak a quarter of a beat one way or the other so that it wouldn't be completely obvious that the bass or the vocal was off.

So the next thing I do is, I put the song on loop and let it sink in. Drum along, sing along, get the rhythm of it into your spine. If you can, run the bass up. Don't worry about trying to learn the words; just let the song sink into you.

When I was lighting I used to dance while I worked, and that really worked. Even if I got distracted, my hands would just keep pounding out the changes while my brain did something else, because my whole body had it.

When you've been editing for awhile and your song has turned into a bunch of half-second bits in your head, you will be glad that your spine still has the big picture.

You'll also be grateful when the drum drops out and the vocal goes off on its own business and the guitarist is off playing frantic 64th notes all over the place and you can't follow any of it for damn, because you'll be able to find the beat again quickly and carry on with scarcely a flicker.

Tango

That's the last song I vidded. It was written by Tom Waits, it's being performed by the Holly Cole Trio, who are a jazz group, it's fairly musically complex. Too complex for me, if I had to understand it, which fortunately, I don't.

I don't actually care, la la la, because underneath it all it's still ticking along, ONE two Three four, ONE two Three four, ONE two Three four ... and as much as I played with the entwined rhythms, I can always go back there, any time I need to.

OK, so you have the song, and you've learned the song. And you will STILL end up having to go back to drumming on your legs a lot, with a song of any complexity, because you WILL get lost. It's okay. Just catch up again and go on.

The next thing you do is figure out how long each bar is. Tango is 3 2/3 seconds per bar.

Every single "ONE two Three Four" requires me to have 3 2/3 seconds -- 110 frames -- of footage after losses from transitions.

This is where you think about lyrics and matching the action to the words. When we're down to fine cutting, we'll be forgetting about the words, so think about them really carefully now, so that you're not trying to work with that later.

You have your own methods for clip selection, I'm not going to try to tell you how to do it. Besides, I mostly just flail around, myself.

I will note that unless you're going for a very dreamy effect, you probably want a LOT of one-bar and half-bar clips. 3:2/3 seconds is a LONG time in a 3-minute vid.

Tango has, more whole-bar clips than I have ever used before or ever expect to use again, and it has I think 2 clips that are longer than a single bar, and they both took a lot of thinking before I used them, and are both used in very slow, langourous places in the song.

And you will probably have some high-intensity spots where you want 1/4 or even 1/8th bar clips. This can be tricky, but also very useful -- rather than chop up good long clips for this, keep an eye out for little tiny bits of motion that you take totally out of context and use in these one second and half second spots.

You also want at least a second's slack on each clip -- unless your clip is less than a second, in which case double is about right.

If you need 3:2/3 seconds, cut 5:00 or even 6:00. This is going to be important later, when you are synching to internal motion.

III. We Know You Can Dance To The Beat

I find cutting a bar at a time is easiest. Stick it in your timeline, get it exactly how you want it, move on to the next bar.

I PLAN in terms of sequences -- typically, a line of a song is two bars, a couplet is four bars, a verse is eight, and after eight bars generally with 4/4 music your sequence is over and the music will either repeat or go do some different thing.

This is not always true, so learn to pick out the sequences. Remember, I'm talking about your very basic typical rock and roll song; extrapolate from there.

So, I plan in terms of sequences. One sequence = one verse or chorus, and therefore one concept expressed in linked clips. A sequence is a single part of the longer narrative.

But I CUT in bars. Half a line of lyrics at a time, roughly.

A bar of music, for a vidder, gives you a fair deal to keep in your head at a time -- the beat, the music, the lyrics, the vocal performance, the content of the clip, the movement of the clip, the lighting of the clip, your transitions, how the clips talk to each other and to the clips before and after them ... a bar is enough.

Now, go get your clips. I'll wait.

Ok, got them?

Okay. New clips begin on a beat. Always -- unless you are working with two clips to a beat, and even then it's on the beat and then exactly halfway between. This is why we did all that drumming, so that you can find your beat.

The reason this happens is because the music is telling your viewer, all the time, what needs to be emphasised, what bits are important. You can't override that message easily; we've all been listening to music for too long not to have absorbed its conventions.

And the biggest, most ingrained concept that Western music has (I'd dearly love to see a vid done by someone who grew up on, for example, Indian traditional music, which has very different rules, btw) is this:

New things begin on a beat. Important new things begin on an emphasised beat. REALLY important new things and new CONCEPTS begin on the ONE beat.

You can break the "new things begin on a beat" rule very carefully and consciously if you're going for dissonance -- but by the time you can do that, you won't give a damn what I think, so call it a hard and fast rule for now. Generally speaking, there are other ways to get dissonance, and if you cut between beats with less than ninjalike precision and craft, it is altogether too likely to just look like a mess to most people. I can't do it.

So, the basics:

If you have a full-bar clip, it cuts in on the ONE.
(ONE two Three four and change clips)

Full-bar clip

If you have two half-bar clips, you cut in on ONE and Three.
(ONE two and change clips Three four)

Two half-bar clips

If you have four 1/4 bar clips you cut in on all beats.

(ONE and change clips two and change clips Three and change clips four and change clips)

Four quarter-bar clips

And of course, you can have combinations -- a half-bar and two 1/4 bar clips in various combinations, for instance. As long as you have a bar total.

Quarter-bar, quarter-bar, half-bar

If you are going for either dissonance or extreme smoothness -- big obvious changes for dissonance, very similar clips and an internal synch on the ONE for extreme smoothness -- you can cut on the backbeat -- so then you cut in on two or on two and four:

(Clip from last bar carries over ONE and change clips two Three Four)
or

(Clip from last bar carries over ONE and change clips two Three and change clips four)

Quarter-bar, half-bar, quarter-bar

Note that you if you are using this as part of a vid cut primarily on the frontbeat, you'll probably want to "clean up" at the end of either this bar or the next. You can push the smooth thing further; the dissonance, no. The effect is in my experience limited; if you keep it going for long the eye adjusts and it just plays as miscut video. If you want cumulative dissonance and uneasiness, keep coming back to the two and four cuts at regular intervals (the same point in every verse or every chorus can work very well), rather than keeping it going for more than two bars at a time.

You can cut an entire vid on the backbeat, which would I think give a very smooth and slinky effect. Tango has a lot of backbeat cutting, playing off of the syncopation and the crisper, darker vocal sections, which I cut on the frontbeat. It's all a matter of what the song and the footage want.

IV. It goes Round And Round And Round...

So, how do you cut on beat?

Most software will let you look at your audio, and you can see the peaks that mean percussion fairly easily and align with them precisely so that the first frame of your video clip or the precise centre of your transition is precisely where your new bar begins, as long as your percussion or some other detectable musical peak is present and 'on', not early or late.

Then you'll have to deliberately and maliciously disalign them, because the software isn't designed to compensate for the imperfections of the human eye. None of the clips you have seen so far are at their 'nominal' lengths -- they have all been tweaked to look as they ought to.

Generally speaking, you need to bring the cut in three frames -- 3/30 of a second -- before the beat, in order for it to register on your eye as 'right'.

Generally. Sometimes you need to be as much as six frames ahead, if your footage is unusually dark, or if the clips you're cutting between are very similar. Or if you are going from a very light clip to a very dark one, or one with a lot of motion to a very still one.

If you are going from a very dark one to a very light one. you may need as few as two frames.

If you are using a transition -- I use a 10-frame cross-dissolve as my default, so that the eye won't pick up the actual clip change as movement, but will instead see the change of scene -- that will make a difference too. The precise centre of the transition may not be where the eye picks up the change.

If you use a fancy transition, it's even more up in the air.

Start with the computer, but always use your eyes and ears as the final authority. There are too many variables in how we see light and motion for your software to cope with; if it looks wrong, it IS wrong. This is a visual art, and there is no other standard except how it looks. What matters is not when the actual clip change happens. It's when your eye registers the scene as having changed.

When you hear that beat, you want to see that change, and you want it to be so crisp and sharp it snaps, and the only way to get there is to keep fiddling it until you are suited, even if it makes your software weep.

Period. The rest is details.

And just to drive you REALLY crazy -- YOU are going to be training your eyes. The more you vid, the closer to the computer's 'ideal' timing you will get. The more you work on a particular vid, the closer you will get again. Which means that to most people, your perfect transitions will look a little late, because you are seeing it before they do.

There are two ways to compensate for this. First -- get your beta to check it, if you have a beta. Their eyes are fresher.

Secondly, at the end of your vid, when all the edits are done, and after you've been away from it for a day or ideally two -- pull the entire audio track back 3 frames, run it, and see how it looks. Then pull it back 3 more and do it again. That is probably too far. Somewhere in the middle is where you want to be.

Tango went back 5 frames at the end of the editing process. To me, and possibly to some other vidders, it looks about 1-2 frames fast, but within tolerance; I don't 'read' the transitions as ahead of the beat, quite, and to most people they look dead on. Get it as tight as you can without it looking 'ahead' of the beat to you, and you should have the best compromise between technical precision and feel.

V. Fall in line just watching all their feet

Okay, so you have your 5-second clip and you're going to fit it into your 3 2/3 second bar.

Now we find out what all that slack is for. It's for internal motion synching.

"Internal motion synching" basically means cutting your clips so that not only does your clip begin and end on the beat, but what happens in the clip happens on the beat.

This is a one-bar cut, but something happens on every single beat:

like this

Cut in and the hat hits the head on ONE -- adjust brim on two -- hand comes down and straighten shoulders on Three, walk forward on four.

Also, notice that the vocal is not on beat -- the line begins and ends outside this bar. That's syncopation -- the vocal and instrumental line are not following the beat, they are on the backbeat, working against it, deliberately playing off of it.

Just follow the beat and you'll be fine, though it gives you some interesting challenges -- and opportunities -- in terms of how you select your clips to match your lyrics, because your cuts are going to be at odd places within the lines. It also gives you a lot of opportunities to play with the syncopation by synching your internal motion to the backbeat while keeping your cuts on the front beat, or vice-versa.

Your use of coherent concepts still stays with the vocal, there, but for cutting purposes, you stop worrying about when lines begin and end, and only pay attention to how the voice waxes and wanes, the tone, and sometimes individual words -- see below.

If the motion happens between beats, you lose half your impact:

Desynched

Same footage, same bar, and it still begins on the beat and ends on the beat, but meh. Something that had a lot of power has become just another bit of footage.

Now, not all motion in a vid is important, and some is more important than the rest.

You only need to synch what draws the eye most strongly, and avoid desynching anything that is fairly strong. (Sadly, this occasionally means you have to toss a clip because there are two strong out-of-synch motions on it. Try speeding it up or slowing it down, first, and see how it synchs then.)

There will always be some 'lost' motion, and that is okay. There are two guys in the background of that hat clip and they are both moving, but you're really not going to notice it if you do not look for it.

You just play that bar over and over and over again until it is as good as you can make it, and there you are.

Crop, play, undo, adjust, crop, play, undo ...

You can also use this to emphasize certain words/beats/mood changes:

Tango Kiss

Hear the strong emphasis on "floor?" That is on the three, and I wanted to play that up. I didn't want a lot of emphasis on "Cubans", because that's one of those small awkward bits of lyric which is not actually doing anything in this vid.

So that's where the tongues meet, because I wanted to play that up as well, and all of the motion in that clip is pulling us towards that moment; by synching the footage with what the music is doing, I get a strong effect. And, hopefully, make people think about kissing Paul McGann on a floor, which is not a bad notion... bit of foreshadowing, there.

If you cut something so that your main motion is on the ONE, you get surprise and emphasis.

For less surprise but stronger emphasis, you can cut on four and then on one:

Three-Quarter, quarter, full

If you cut it on the three, you get tension building up over ONE and two and then your emphasis.

If you do it on two or four, you can get DE-emphasis. One of the worst parts of cutting Tango was that one of the lines contains the word "PIG" and it is strongly stressed in the vocal line. And it's on three. And almost every Tango clip has someone in it; well over half of those shots are close-ups, too.

Now, nobody I vidded is in fact a pig, and I do not wish to suggest that they are, so this presented a real problem. I wanted to make sure that the viewer responded to 'turn the spit on that pig' as a complete thought, to make it about reckless over-the-top behaviour, not just to the single word.

So I wanted to work AGAINST the vocal, and de-emphasize what it emphasized, as far as I can.

So I cut up to it, carefully -- the bar before it has two clips, strong cut on three, transitional clip on four, then a strong cut in on the ONE, using a clip with good contrast to the clip before it -- but with the same character -- and with strong, fairly constant motion -- which is NOT facial -- and a strong cut in on the ONE after it, and that emphasised beat is mellowed appreciably.

Turn the Spit on that pig...this is the big one, 4M

And this is why you need all that slack on your clips. You're going to be cropping and recropping until the internal motion is synched to suit you perfectly. At which point you still need your 3:2/3.

As an added bonus, when you've cut your clips that way, some of them -- especially the ones that to you set the tone or mark the climax of a sequence -- will be burned into your brain. These are your 'tag' clips, and they are insanely useful.

For Tango, two of my tag clips were the kiss, and the hat clip.

What I mean by that is, I know EXACTLY how those two bars -- and about ten others -- are timed, to within a frame. I've stared at them so much, getting them as I wanted them, that I can't possibly forget where they go.

If I've done a bunch of messing around and I replay my vid and they are as much as two frames off, I'll see it, and I'll know that something in the rest of the vid is off. And I know roughly where, by checking which are on and which are off.

Because the danger of cutting on the beat and by the bar is, you can absent-mindedly introduce a half-bar or a whole bar into your vid and not notice right away; it will LOOK fine, until you pull back and go hey, wait, that isn't where that clip belongs.

And when you have to tweak each clip to make the timing right, a frame here, a frame there -- error accumulates. One frame is a thirtieth of a second; you can miss one-two-three extra frames in a bar very easily. But if you do that enough times in a row, whups, you're a quarter-second off and it SHOWS.

If you know your tag clips, they will tip you off to timing problems and give you a place to start hunting.

VI. They don't know where they wanna go/But they're walking in time

And really, that's it. Two very simple concepts -- cutting and synching -- but they make everything else work better.

Cut to the beat, synch internal motion to the beat, and your vid will hang together through pretty much everything else you want to do to it, because no matter how wild you get, it'll always have that basic grounding to it, the way a dancer's feet always hit the floor between moves, no matter how far they've flown.

The rest is subjective -- it's your art, you do what looks and feels right to you. And have fun.

Comments

[permetaform]

KICK. ASS.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

Oh YAY. I wasn't sure if I wasn't just stating the obvious at tedious length...

[accio-draco.livejournal.com]

Wow. Thanks. Very useful. I'll have to re-read it with proper caffienation, but, no doubt, there's some valuable info to be learned. Good job.

Do you have any other tutorials?

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

Glad it looks useful!

And no, this is all I got...

[marycrawford.livejournal.com]

Holy shit. Wow. Thanks so much for putting this up. I'm drumming on my knees as we speak.

Mary, tadpole vidder

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

*bows* I live to serve!

Drop me a comment and let me know when your first vid goes up?

[guede-mazaka.livejournal.com]

Funny thing--I write exclusively to music. Have specialized playlists created for irony, horror/suspense, action...so the whole working-to-the-beat idea's applicable to that, too. I'm pretty sure it's been influencing the rhythm of the words and story flow in my fic.

And mwhee! Haven't seen time signatures since I quit piano three years ago. Flashback!

[prairiedaun.livejournal.com]

Awesome. I don't vid, but thank you for this, it was an awesome read.

Also, as a bass drummer I was reading your information on the beats going "yep, yeah, that's right." Your beat is basically what I try to do in the band- set the groove so that everyone else can follow along (because pipers and snares are finicky creatures).

Good job, and thank you for this.

[twistingflame.livejournal.com]

Rightous! As someone with quite a bit of music training, a lot of it is repititious for me, but it's all explained so simply I don't need the training. Very cool. ::memories::

[black-hound.livejournal.com]

Yes. Yes. Yes.

*to the beat .... *

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

*bops*

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

I'm always amazed when people put this degree of intellectual thought into it. *g* I know where the beat is in my body, and 90% of my vids have been cut to that internal rhythm, without ever knowing whether the song was in 4/4 or cutting three to six frames before the beat or anything like that.

OTOH, I am a messy vidder, so maybe this shows. :p

It was morgandawn who taught me about actually cutting before the beat, and from astolat I learned about visually marking beats in the timeline. I pay attention to both of these things now. But I'm still very far from viewing this as a *mental* process. It always just feels like a body-thing, a gut thing, a *feeling* thing.

Still, it's great to have the detailed instructions. (: Thanks for a wonderful post.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

Oh, Lord, I had to be poked and prodded to unpack this.

I've always done it by feel as well, which is why I was so amazed to find out that it actually wasn't all common knowledge. I'm glad this works for you; I was trying really hard to recreate that process and feeling of having gotten it into my body and learning to work with it instinctively...

[gryphons-lair.livejournal.com]

Saving to Memories in case I ever go insane decide to take up vidding. :)

[carbonelle.livejournal.com]

Yup. Me too! Too good to lose.

[lexica510.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is fascinating. I know nothing about vidding, but I love reading things written by people who are passionate about what they do.

Note to self: do NOT try to pick up a new hobby. Just don't.

[sisabet.livejournal.com]

If you 'can't keep time' when you do these things, or when you are on a dance floor, if you've tried to learn and just can't find it?
I'm not going to say you can't make vids.

Oh thank god. Cause I was reading that part with a sinking feeling. And here is the rub - I have no ability to find the beat with my body and yet... I know it is there and I know how to visualize it and I think I can represent that in vid-form. But dude - total spaz on the dance floor and I cannot, I repeat, cannot clap along.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

And see, that makes me glad that I did after all put that in there; I really did not want to do the One True Way thing, not at all.

Because yeah, I totally know there are other ways to experience music and do this sort of stuff. The beat as a visual thing... wow. That is a total coolness, but it's a coolness I can't grasp at all. So I bet this is just zero use to you, but I really wanna see your vids.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Great explanation of cutting footage to music...

But, *ahem* (this is going to sound incredibly f*cking stupid), what does everyone mean by "vidding", in this context? I've done a google, which explains nothing.

Obviously there's a particular meaning here, but it has escaped me for months... Any lessening of my ignorance is a good thing! :-)

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I hesitate to offer too narrow a definition, but you could take a look over at vidding for a sample of the sorts of things determined fans can get up to with some footage, some music, and some software...

[entropic.livejournal.com]

Wow. Thank you. This is so incredibly awesomely helpful.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

*Bows* I live to perv serve.

[wemblee.livejournal.com]

1) This? Is awesome. *Thank you.*

2) *Who* is that, singing that lovely rendition of "Hallelujah"?

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

You are MOST welcome.

KD Lang, from _Hymns of the 49th Parallel_. Recommended highly.

[lea-ysaye.livejournal.com]

Oh boy, I am halfway through with reading, and I am weeping already... This is excellent, but now I must go and do some serious work on my last project! However, thank you for making sense even to unmusical folk like me. :)

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

Glad it's helpful!

Can I see the vid when it's done? Post it to vidding or something?

[wistful-fever.livejournal.com]

I wonder how this applies to a more impulse-driven sort of vidder. See, I love this meta and I find it very interesting and helpful, and I'm not disagreeing with it in the slightest, but at the same time, I think I hear music differently and that this isn't always something someone can learn. I can't organize music in my head beyond strong, repetitive sounds, so when I cut/vid, I cut/vid to the strongest sounds, the ones that evoke the most feeling in me.

Hmm. Must think on this more and see if I can translate it into actual logical thought.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

*nod nod nod*

Sounds like you've got a style that works for you; if playing around with anything here can get you unstuck sometime, cool, but as I said up top, it's by no means the only, or even necessarily the best, way to work.

Glad you enjoyed it, though!

[keerawa.livejournal.com]

I'm working on my very first vid. I've got a strong sense of rhythm, but the synching of internal movement to the beats really hadn't occurred to me. I'm both intimidated and elated.

Thanks commodorified!

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

*bows* Glad you found it helpful!

Honestly, I was lucky. My first vid was from a British comedy, and I swear they train actors over there to BREATHE in 4/4 time. So the first bits of internal synching I did were serendipitous; the clips just landed like that, and I started to notice how bloody GOOD it looked when that happened.

Then I learned how to play with cutting or even slightly speeding or slowing clips to get them to sych, and it's become, really, second nature.

All of which is to say, it's not as hard as it sounds; it's amazing how well most source co-operates!

[bop-radar.livejournal.com]

Wow! This post is the best thing ever! *clings to it*
Having only JUST begun vidding, I had worked out (by picking a song that has the heaviest most beat ever) that I needed to cut on the beat, and in bars but having the most basic go at it had left me very perplexed and overwhelmed--did I cut where the music peaked or where it looked right? why were they not the same place? how long were bars and how could I be sure? etc etc.

So I went to vidding for help, and I swear this was the first memory I clicked to and it answered all my questions! *weeps with joy* Thank you so much! Now I just have the daunting task of absorbing it all and practising, practising, practising...

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

God, I wish I were sober enough to answer this properly...

Actually,

"YAY! I'm glad it helped! I AM USEFUL!" about covers it.

Thank you for commenting!

[twistingflame.livejournal.com]

Wow. This has some really amazing stuff in it, especially for someone like me who's been thinking about trying to vid but never really getting very far. And I have quite a bit of music background and it didn't feel oversimplified at all on the what is music/beat section. So I think you found a perfect balance there.

Question though, did you take down the clips on purpose or have the links just gone dead over time? Because I think they would really add to the lesson if you still have them available. I'd certainly like to see them anyway.

Regardless of the clips or not though, this is a fantastic tutorial. Thank you so much.

Re: vidding meta files

[redina]

Aye, I just went back to this since it was highly recommended and the files were no longer available. Shame but the advice still is very good.

Dina

[china_shop]

at the end of your vid, when all the edits are done, and after you've been away from it for a day or ideally two -- pull the entire audio track back 3 frames, run it, and see how it looks

Ohhhh! Fascinating. I need to try this!

*bookmarks* Thank you!

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

It is possibly the most useful thing I ever learned.

Glad this is still coming in handy, yay!

[samjohnsson.livejournal.com]

You explain that better than some textbooks I've taught out of.

[jmtorres.livejournal.com]

Secondly, at the end of your vid, when all the edits are done, and after you've been away from it for a day or ideally two -- pull the entire audio track back 3 frames, run it, and see how it looks. Then pull it back 3 more and do it again. That is probably too far. Somewhere in the middle is where you want to be.


And, oh, this one's a kick in the teeth to deal with too, it matters what venue your vid will be viewed in, because sound travels slower than light. The difference between viewing on your computer at home and putting it up on a big screen at con is going to be about three frames..

[astromachy.livejournal.com]

This post is incredible. Hell, YOU'RE incredible. This is beautifully explained. Thank you, very much!

I'm just beginning to teach myself to vid, and I've been having huge problems with even identifying the beat, let alone cutting on it, and you've given me some new strategies to try.

[thenewbuzwuzz]

This was really interesting, and I've saved it for my future vidding adventures. :)