Lip sync done

After 11 hours work, the lip syncing is done.  It's not terribly arduous or anything, it's just slow going.  Basically I have to find the part of the music video that matches the part used in the mix and line it up so that the singers lips move in sync with the words being sung.  I only want the bits of video with the band members in it, [unless there was something particularly memorable about the rest of the video].  And I don't need much for each song as there needs to be room for everything else. [movies/TV/etc]

Once again, I'll have a go at briefly explaining how it's done..

In the above shot the Blue track is the master music mix for the final video [that is - All the songs mixed together.]  The track at the bottom is the video I'm wanting to sync up.  The purple track in the middle is the original audio from that video.  All you have to do is line the blue and purple waveforms up so that they'll play at the same time.  Then delete the purple track and you're left with the video playing in sync with the music! 

Now just repeat this process for all the songs in the mix and 11 hours later you're done!

The video now has lots of blank spaces between short clips of music videos.  I now have to go back and fill them in with all the movie, TV, video games and news clips.

Music Mixing Video

So, there you go,  a vid featuring a little bit of the music mixing process.  I threw it together fairly hastily as I'd rather spend my time making the actual video instead of making "Making of" videos, but I did want to do a few of these along the way.  So,  I hope it's informative and let me know if you want to see other parts of the process done this way.  Cheers.

Music Mix Complete!

The music mix is done!  Phew.  Total time spent on the music was 28 hours!
Now on to the video.  First, I have to go through and sync up all the music videos with the audio.  More on that later.

For now, enjoy a two minute sneak preview of the audio mix!



About now it starts to feel like I'm finally getting somewhere.  Yay!

Recipe for Mixing Music

Today:  A quick lesson in music mixing.

First you'll need some kind of multi-track audio editing software.  I use an old version of Audition I've had for years and am familiar with, but something like Audacity or GarageBand will work great too.

It helps to have some basic understanding of how music structure works. 

You'll also need to know your way around an audio waveform.  Here's one I prepared earlier:

 

This is what sound looks like represented as an image.  Notice the drum beats are easily identified by sharp peaks.  [At least in this waveform]  I've also labeled the beats 1,2,3 & 4.  99% of popular music works with multiples of 4 beats per bar.  I'm not going into all that here though,  1,2,3,4,1,2,3,4 will do for this.

Here's what it looks like when songs are blended together:

Notice how the first waveform's 1,2,3,4 are playing at the same time as the second's.  This is the key to the rapid fire mixes used in Remember videos.  The "1" beat of the entering song should play at the same time as the "1" beat of the exiting song.  Get that right and you've done most of the work.

You don't necessarily need to keep the 2,3,4 going as in the above example either, as long as your "1's" are firing at the same time, you're on the right track.  As seen in this mix:

Now, it helps a lot if the songs are a similar speed of course.  That's where knowing all the beats per minute's comes in handy. [Took care of that in a previous post.]  Armed with that info,  you can select songs within five or so bpm's of each other and they have a fairly good chance of blending together without too much trouble.

Much more could be said, but hopefully this has been somewhat interesting.  Hopefully the bootleggers have found this helpful too.  Looking forward to some more tight mixing from you guys!

In the mean time, I'm not quite done with the audio mix yet.  Just a couple more songs to add.  See you next post.

Mixing the Music

I was meaning to keep track of the actual hours spent on this project. So far I've forgotten about it, but from now on I'll try to keep a running tally.  So just in case you thought I hadn't been doing anything for the past few weeks,  I've clocked up 21 hours on mixing the songs so far!

This could be the most important part of the process, so its worth taking time to get the mixes tight.  When the music flows along nicely it's more pleasant to the ears and the video becomes more captivating to watch.  Plus there's something really rewarding about pulling off a great mix!

See if you can make head or tail of this screenshot while I get back to it.  More info on mixing the music in the next post.

Probably a meaningless screenshot. [unless you know anything about audio editors]