Placing beats on an audio track or lyric sync

richard-courtney wrote on 11/16/2005, 2:20 PM

Our goal: Have lyrics match the live performance

Presently, someone advances powerpoint slides manually to display the
correct lyrics. Is there a way to make a video to make this task easier?

Thought about placing beats, such as metronome clicks, on one track and
use something like IFB receivers for lead musicians. If they stay on tempo
the lyrics should be correct throughout the song.

Other than getting someone that can read and follow music score advance
powerpoint, any ideas?

Comments

JJKizak wrote on 11/16/2005, 2:32 PM

You could record the live performance, put it on the timeline and then on another video track use the text with different color backgrounds with the lyrics and then keyframe the bouncing ball to them. When your done delete the recorded performance, render to whatever you want. Just my two cents as long as the band stays in tempo.

JJK

richard-courtney wrote on 11/17/2005, 6:30 AM

Thanks for your reply. That might get my tempo close to what they
actually perform.

In case I was not clear, need to sync lyrics during live performance.

Chienworks wrote on 11/17/2005, 7:03 AM

I dunno, if it was me and this is an important performance, i wouldn't count on matching tempo. There's too much chance for drift. I'd stick with powerpoint and hire a piano student to follow the score and press the button.

craftech wrote on 11/17/2005, 7:23 AM

I agree with Kelly. Anything automated is too dependent on the performance being done exactly the same each time. Never gonna happen. You need someone with a feel for music and performance at the controls. Even a sound board operator during a musical has to have a sense for stage and theatre to do it well and roll with the mistakes, etc to have it sound good. Robotic controls usually work best when robots are performing.

John

richard-courtney wrote on 11/17/2005, 6:43 PM

Thanks all for responding.

Best is to use robots.... or at least record the musicians and put
their performance on the audio track and use Vegas to create the lyrics
on the video track.

Need someone that can read music for the live performances.

Chienworks wrote on 11/17/2005, 11:22 PM

Maybe at the concert the audio should come from the video playback and the band should lipsync and "airband" the performance. ;)

More seriously though, if what is on the screen is visible to the button pusher, do they need to read music? As long as you have a unique slide for everything, rather than say having one chorus slide that has to be returned to several times, the button pusher can merely go on to the next slide when the band finishes singing what's on the screen now. Heck, you could use a random person off the street and tell them which button to push and they should be able to handle it. This is what we did at my church for projection when we were using PowerPoint. We made sure that there was a sequence of slides that exactly matched what would be sung. If a chorus was repeated we would have a duplicate slide. If the last line of a refrain is repeated several times we'd make sure it was on that slide that many times. Any random volunteer merely had to be aware enough to hear when the praise team sang the last line displayed on the screen and then push the right arrow key. It's about as low-skill a job as they come.

jaegersing wrote on 11/17/2005, 11:44 PM

Yes, I agree that this is a low-tech task. The guy pressing the spacebar just needs to be able to read the lyrics and listen to the performance (same as any member of the audience). When all the words on screen have been sung, press spacebar to bring up the next page (or line) of text. The sync does not even have to be very tight, just make sure that there are no fancy PPT transitions that delay the appearance of each screen.

Richard Hunter