How can I make "Brady Bunch" tiles?

kfinpgh wrote on 4/3/2013, 3:43 PM

One of our group suggested we set up a clip of multiple people all saying the same thing and arrange it in tiled fashion, much like the "Brady Bunch" TV show did.

If Movie Studio 12 can do that, how many tiles can I place in one scene? Do I need to make sure all of the clips involved are the same length and synchronized? I'm assuming that I would have to provide X frames of silence, then the shout, then X frames of silence for each clip.

We may have 27-35 participants in this portion of the video, so using tiles would have a fun effect and reduce the repetition.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 4/3/2013, 4:03 PM

Each "tile" has to be it's own separate track. Use Track Motion to reduce the size and place the smaller image where you want it to be in the frame. Your limit will be the number of tracks you have available, which i believe is 10.

If that's not enough, you can do it in pieces, creating 3x3 tiles for 9 of the people, and render this into an intermediate file. You can then bring these intermediate files into a new project and use track motion to reduce and reposition them, getting up to 9x9 for 81 tiles.

Synchronization shouldn't be too hard. Yes, have some silence before and after so that you have some room to play with. Lining them up on the timeline by looking at the audio track should be extremely simple. Simply drag the clips left or right to match the others. You can then do a Split across all the tracks and delete all the unwanted material before and after the shout.

mike_in_ky wrote on 4/4/2013, 9:23 AM

SMS12 allows up to 20 video tracks and 20 audio tracks.

kfinpgh wrote on 4/4/2013, 1:21 PM

Thanks for your quick reply.

This is my first video project with this package, so I'm sure that I will consult these forums a lot.

Chienworks wrote on 4/4/2013, 2:52 PM

Now that i think of it, if you've got more than, say, 10 people, the audio might be better done by grabbing as many of them as you can all in one room and having them shout all together and record that. Use that as the only audio track. When you record them individually ditch the individual audio and just line up the mouth movement to the one group audio recording. With that many people no one would ever be able to tell if it's the same number of people they see shouting as they hear, or even if indeed it's the same people. It'll just be a mixture anyway. Also, if they're all together they can practice shouting it all together the same way, at the same speed.

The problem with mixing that many audio tracks is that it won't take long for them to add up to a distortion level so you have to keep dropping the volume on them. And, any other background noise will also accumulate from all of the separate tracks.

You could still keep the separate audio tracks on the timeline so that you can align them by looking at the audio waveform, but i'd either mute them or delete them after the alignment is done.