Adapt video to the music rhythm

verticalheat wrote on 6/22/2007, 7:49 AM
I'm new to Vegas software. My problem(s) is that I have to learn 'how to do all the basics' and at the same time un-learn all the tricks of my old main video application.

Here we go: I have 2 min, video and background music. Video is slideshow with some cuts and transitions. The first 15 sec. is not important. After this first 15sec. I want to adapt video cuts/transitions to the rhythm of the background music . What is the fastest (and easy) way to do it in Vegas?

Comments

AlanC wrote on 6/22/2007, 8:12 AM
Hooray, I finally see a question that I can answer (or part answer)

Place your background music on the timeline and play it back. At every point that you want to create a cut, hit the "M" key. This will overlay a marker on the timeline which you can use to accurately position your cuts.

When I say accurately, it depends how good your ear to finger co-ordination is. At my age I have to allow for about 0.05 second delay in hearing the beat and making my finger hit the key. :~)

Alan
verticalheat wrote on 6/22/2007, 8:41 AM
Alan,

Thank you for the very fast response to my question. this is the good news. This forum is great. The bad news is ..... I was trying to find the method which is more 'automatic and precise'. In my case (only 105 sec of music/video) it is possible to do it, but if I have to do hundreds of slides in this very manual way... I love my Vegas 6 for many different things, but I think that something basic like this should be possible to do in less manual fashion. Maybe there is a plug-in which can be use to speed up this process?

One more time thank you for your suggestion and time.

Verticalheat
AlanC wrote on 6/22/2007, 8:48 AM
When you say slides do you mean photo's or frames.

If photos then you can set the Still Image Length before you drag them onto the timeline.

Options\Preferences Then select the Editing Tab. In there you can set the desired length of your still images.

The experts may/will have a better way no doubt.

Alan
earthrisers wrote on 6/22/2007, 8:50 AM
If you're talking about STILL-pictures as opposed to motion-video, then there's an extremely fast and easy way, via the "Photo Montage" feature in the VASST "Ultimate S" plug-in. Either version 2 or version 3 of that plug-in will include that feature, among a bunch of other features.
Info is here:
www.vasst2.com/search.aspx?category=VASST+Plugins&sort=priority

PS: I have no connection to VASST except being a customer of theirs.

-Ernie
Modification: "Spoke" too soon. UltimateS will fit your series of slides exactly to the length of your selected music, but the duration of each slide will be the same---won't necessarily match the BEAT of your music. Some manual tweaking will be necessary, via the "Marker" methods mentioned by the earlier posters. UltS gets you a very big step in the right direction, but not all the way to where you're wanting to go...
verticalheat wrote on 6/22/2007, 9:09 AM
Alan,

Sorry, English is my second language (and like my Vegas it's work in progress) so I was not clear enough. Slides in my case = pictures. I know how to control frame numbers for each slide/picture (I also use VASST Ultimate S plug-in which helps a lot to speed up pictures processing). How ever my problem is that I would like to "scan" the audio/background music, find the peek point of the beat and use this points to sync/ my cuts and transitions. In such case I think, the number of the frames for each picture must be adjusted to the peek points of the sound beat (which are closest to the designated length of each picture). I hope that this make sense.

Regards


Verticalheat
AlanC wrote on 6/22/2007, 9:35 AM
Well English is my first and only language (apart from a little bit of French). Your written English is excellent.

The only other method I can suggest is to expand the height and zoom in on the audio track, large enough so that you can see the waveform. You should then be able to see the peaks easily but the peaks may not correspond to the beat.

Sorry but that's about all I can offer.

Alan
nolonemo wrote on 6/22/2007, 10:15 AM
>>I would like to "scan" the audio/background music, find the peek point of the beat and use this points to sync/ my cuts and transitions<<

Problem is that the amplitude of the wave form won't always show the "beats" of the music, which are more than mere volume changes. I suspect that even if you could find software that did this analysis, the amount of time you spend doing clean-up on the false beat hits would be more than just listening through the music and marking the beats manually.....

But perhaps you could do this: Assuming you are using a piece of music that has a steady rhythm, perhaps you can calculate the time between the beats you want to cue to, then use that time to set the image length when you import your images to vegas (i.e., 2 minutes of music contains 60 "beat points", so there's 2 seconds between, so set your image length to 2 seconds). Then it's just a simple matter of sliding the audio track to sync up the beat points with the image cuts. If your calculation is a little off, and the beat is drifting off the cuts, just strecth the audio track (or, conversely, the video track) to match up the final beat and cut.
teaktart wrote on 6/22/2007, 10:31 AM
Don't Look ....!

Play your audio track and don't look at the screen
Instead hit your M key every time you "feel" the beat

Then go and put your images to the markers.

(you can drag the whole group of images up onto the timeline and then manually "snap" to your markers, actually your ULT S will to that too)

Yes, its sort of slow but editing IS rather slow when you want to get it just right.....
Grazie wrote on 6/22/2007, 10:59 AM
There is a SlideShowToMarkers script that does this.

Do a seach here or on the SCRIPT Forum.
Per1 wrote on 6/22/2007, 11:04 AM
If it's only matching a beat I guess it's only mathematics as mentioned above.

But, music usually have some bridge or similar that will shift it all out of place. I think one have to make it by listening and pressing M.
verticalheat wrote on 6/23/2007, 7:12 AM
Well,

Thank you all. It's look that this subject is more complicated than I thought. I know that some entry level editors (50 USD and more) have build in ' tempo recognition assistant ' tool and some use modules which mix pictures/video with background music using rhythm and tempo. The results are far from perfection, but in many situations it's good enough to do the job. I wonder how this is done in in the big production studios? Anyway at this point I have to try to do it with Vegas using yours tips. One more time thank you all for your help and time.

Verticalheat
farss wrote on 6/23/2007, 7:53 AM
The problem is kind of messy.
I don't know of any software that'll reliably detect beats, the informatio to do so just mightn't be in the music and add in the possibility of a temp change and you can see why that approach isn't going to work.

Vegas can generate metronome ticks but then there's another problem. A lot music isn't metronome accurate and even if it is only certain BPMs are factors of the frame rates.

However music designed for use in video oftenly is. In one of those "duh" moments I realised that SFPro seems to do this as a matter of course, even specs the BPM as frames per beat. So with this kind of music automation is quite practical. For example at 12.5 frames per beat (120BPM) if all your stills are multiples of 1 second in length they should always land on a beat (assuming PAL).

As I know less than zero about music I hope I got the above right.

Bob.