>1. In the timeline, stop your cursor where you would want the marker togo:
2. Go up to just about the time line (in that gray area) and right click again.
3. Choose "Marker/Region" - then choose "Insert Marker"
4. By default it will be looking for you go give it a name. You could type in pretty much anything you want....or just leave it black and refer to them as Marker 1, Marker 2, blah blah blah.<<

Or you could simply hit the m key wherever you want a marker. You can do this without stopping the playback.

Gary K.

If you know the tempo of the material, you can set the tempo in Vegas and then switch the time line to display bar:beat:ticks.

Peter

>>Or you could simply hit the m key wherever you want a marker. You can do this without stopping the playback.

That's exactly what I did and it works great! Hit "M" to the beat. Works just great!

SonicPCH,

I'm a musical newbie, other than I know what I like ...

How would I "determine the tempo" of the music? And, once I determine it, how do I set the tempo in Vegas?

Thanks very much!

Marc

Or you could use Excalibur to place a series of markers a specified number of frames apart!

I use the tap the M key to the beat. But inorder to prevent a massive orange bar of marker lines on the timeline i establish a duration and then count 1 2 3 4... and hit the M key every time i say 1.

Excalibur sounds like a great invbestment. I wish i had Vegas 4.0.... ooo not upgrading is keeping me so far behind.

Marc,
Don't worry about tempo and beats. Put your song on the timeline. Play it very loud, and while listening to it, hit m every exact place you want a cut.
If you are using automatic crossfades (which you set in Preferences) you may want to pull the whole track a little back or forth to compensate for the fades. But if you are doing a very rhytmic thing, disable crossfades and go for straight cuts.
Tor

I do a LOT of syncronization to music--I'm also a little picky, since I'm a percussionist. I do not use the markers at all. Instead, I zoom in to the music and see where the beats fall. I then lay my video and cut according to the beats (just on the up beat of the wav (or it feels off))--some are intricate and syncopated, others are very basic--depending on the music and the piece. I do this with stills and video.

If there is a standard beat, and I am using a lot of stills (I mix them a lot with video), I determine what the time is between beats, go to my preferences (editing) and change the time for stills from the default of 5 seconds (200+ frames) to exactly what works..down to .025 or so to get single frame editing if I want to have a rapid fire effect. I then grab my stills all at once and lay them down--so long as I hit the initial beat, the rest are automatically in sync--works really well.

The only thing, remember to go back to preferences and move them back to five or so seconds when your done, or your preview (which uses your default editing time to view the pictures), may not show anything (especially if it is set to 1/30th of a second!).

This works pretty well for me:
1. Determine the tempo (beats per minute) by placing the music track, and playing the music. Count out the beats for one minute (I usually tap my foot). Use a watch, or if your time line scale is in seconds, use that to measure time. Now you have beats per minute. Count a couple of times if you want an average.

2. In the File menu, scroll to "Properties" then select "Ruler" tab at the top of the box. The default setting is 120.00 beats per minute. Enter the number of beats you counted, if different from the defalt setting.

3. Set beats per measure in the box below: Waltz's generally 3 beats to a measure-(BTM), marches 6 BTM but you can count it as 2 BTM. 4 beats per measure is the defalt. On sheet music you see these time values listed as: 3/4, 6/8, 2/4, and 4/4. Exotic music can be anybody's guess, as to the number of beats per minute.

4. Leave the next box as quarter, meaning a quarter note gets one beat.

5. Click Options, scroll to grid spacing, select "Quarter notes"
6. Click Options again, this time scroll to ruler format, select "Measures & Beats"

You don't have to do this in the exact order shown, but the end result is to give you a grid on your time line which helps you visualize where the average beat will fall.

If you forget to change the defalt from 120 beats per minute, you will not get the same number of beat counts between each grid line. Well, unless the music your playing is actually 120 beats per minute. You can tweak the number, if you want by adding to the right of the decimal, but that usually insn't that important.

Hope this helps.

As an amateur who just finished a similar project, may I add a tip? I used a couple of methods as mentioned above to determine where I wanted the pics to fall (I used pictures instead of clips). First I used the 'tap' the 'M' key to get a general feel for the music, then I zoomed in on the audio clip and visually cleaned up my markers by moving some of them around manually. It worked out fantastic. There are only two 'gottchas' that I encountered:
1) My audio sync SEEMED to be way off, but once I rendered it and burned it to a DVD it played perfectly on the TV.
2) Since I used over 200 pics (some of them in rapid sequence), when I used DVDA to create the disk, I didn't realize that the markers would be counted as chapter markers and as such you are only allowed 99. After I was completely satisfied with my project, I just reloaded the veg file and deleted all of the markers and rendered that but I did not resave the veg file in case I wanted to go back and work with the markers again.
Long post, hope it will help.

Bob

Remember that if you choose to hit the "m" key while the song's playing, even if you're a little off-beat on some of the peaks you can always come back after and move the markers (left or right) by dragging those (aligning those with the sound peaks you can easily see on the audio track if you zoom in the timeline). Hitting the "m" key is not a "final decision"...

I love all the free and sideways thinking on this topic. Hmmm.... now then, the beat! Is there a way to use our wonderful s/w and apply an Audio FX to BOOST the base OR/AND filter the audio to just show a particualr peak = beat?

We could then use this as a "check-off" graph to get to the beat? - Anybody understand what I mean? - Wouldn't it be neat if one of "scripting-gurus" were able to then "use" these "peaks" to write a script that would then place Markers to the peaks - yeah?

KKkkooollll

Grazie

Now THAT sums it up Grazie!
Well, next time I'm sick, I'm not going to the doc: I'm going to the next pub... seems that this Stout syrup is -at least- better at stimulating braincells !!!
(and I don't mean anything bad here...)

Grazie, won't work.

The scripting API does not allow you to get at the media data or even

too bad...

If you decide to use the "M" method be sure to nod your head and tap your feet to the beat ... the "M" method works so much better that way. ;)

lol, and bring in some nice chorists/dancers to help keep up with tempo!

I have no idea how successful this might be but you could try this:

On your current music track, open up the EQ plugin and set it to be a low pass filter - try filtering out everything above 120Hz using a steep (24db/octave) filter. Now render the track and add it as a take to the existing track.

Depending on the source material, and how much you play around with the settings, this may or may not be useful. There is no way to filter out everything but the kick - you will inevitably have other instruments (especially the bassline) in there as well. This will work better for contemporary dance music. I wouldn't think you'd get very far with other types of music.

If you have time to experiment, go ahead, but I would stick to the other methods outlined in this thread as being more consistently useful.

Sonic's suggestion to use the Ruler set to bpm is VERY useful if you are musically inclined. It takes a little more planning up front to determine the bpm and get the track properly aligned. But once it's set up, you are good to go - no more faffing around moving markers that are just slightly in the wrong position.

Mark

Yup - Foot tapping here too. Or rather M finger tapping. I've done some really nice uptempo M placement - nearly 8 beats to the bar AND on the cut too!!!

Oh yes, "FAFF-free zone" here too. The less "intereface" between me and my beloved V4 the better. "If you have time to experiment, go ahead, . . . " - thanks! ;-)

However - there's always an "however" with me - I'm starting to yearn for a piece of s/w that somehow "feedsback" that which I'm creating - hence the "peak" thingy I suggested. The advantage of NOT be a programmer is that I tend to come out with this off the wall stuff - "Wouldn't it be nice if . . . " - yeah?

Peace & Love

Grazie

What if......

I was thinking about this in relation to using a keyboard footswitch and midi and stuff, & it occured to me: How would it work to have whatever device hooked up to record to another track as the music played - a cheap mic would even work well, especially with their lower recording levels.

Idea would be as the music was playing, say tap the mic to the beat, where ever it felt right at whatever tempo for that section of music. Should get a track, especially after normalization, with peaks pointing to where you'd do your cuts and so on.

Excellent! - We're nearly there . . .

Grazie

err...what's the Metronome for???

;-)