Cutting to the beat of the music
 

Hi there

Could anyone help me out and tell me how i would go about editing wedding reception footage, everyone up dancing, and you cut to the next scene to the beat of the music.
Hope you can understand what I mean :o)
Is there a simple way?

Thanks guys
Wayne

What I do is play the timeline, listen to the music and hit the mark in button at the moment I want the cut to occur. If it won't let you mark an inpoint while the timeline is playing, hitting pause at the right moment then marking your inpoint should work as well.

Just as a warning, cutting to the beat is something that can be overused, only use it to emphasize certain cuts.

Yup, I do the same thing. I listen to the track in real time and put markers in as the song plays. You may need to drill into the timeline after doing this to precisely adjust the markers to the beat but if you have waveforms turned on you should be able to do this pretty easily.

Thanks guys

Is there any links showing demos i could have a look at, do you know?

Regards
Wayne

With a bit of practice you can identify the beat visually in the music waveform when you've zoomed in.

Here's what I do.

I'm picky about dance footage. I'm not so concerned that it's cut to the beat, because that gets boring, as others have noted. But, I want people to look like they are dancing TO the beat.

So, if I'm rearranging clips that are footage of people dancing to the same song, I make cuts on the beat. Then if I put two clips together, everyone is still dancing to the beat. Once the clip is placed, the cut position can be trimmed to be not so obvious. Even if you put the cut on the beat, but not on beat ONE all the time, it looks better.

If I am putting clips together that came from different songs with different speeds, I still cut to the beat. I put a clip into place, then put on a motion effect (I use AVID, so the one I use is called "trim to fill") that allows me to adjust the speed in increments until the people look like they are dancing to the beat again. Then I put on another clip.

It may sound tedious, but it becomes quick with practice, and looks great (to me, anyway...)

Hope this helps,
Vito

On what Steve said, turn on Waveform display in the audio track if your editor does it. You may need to disband audio from video if your editor supports it. With waveform, you will better 'see' the music to help fine tune your marks.

This is the method i'm using / Prem 6.0 - Prem Pro 2.0


Put clip on timeline / Hit spacebar for playback / Listen to the beat of the
music and hit the * key accordingly.

Premiere will put markers above the timeline to act as a cutting guide.


Works for me.

Herman.

waveform
 

I use the waveform as well. real easy to identify a drum hit / bass blast

This is where Excalibur comes in so handy. I was doing a reception and had two cameras going, one on one side and one on the other side, when the song had different parts, sortof like 'rounds', I just would hit 1 and 2 and 1 and 2, it's pretty effective.

That can work if the peak of the drum hit/bass blast is right on the beat where you want the cut/edit. So while this is a good recipe for some music, it's not always the best way to identify the beat. To do that reliably, regardless of what music I'm dealing with, I know of no better way than to listen to the music while tapping the key that adds a marker in your NLE.

- Martin