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I remain woefully behind on my TV, which makes me behind on LJ because of the number of cut-tags I can't click on without getting spoiled. I should really make time to sit down and catch up. My seventh Doctor torrent continues to poke along, taunting me with the possibility of more Ace someday. I have a couple of vid projects brewing, one being a possible collaboration with Myrtle, but none of them have moved passed the idea stage quite yet. In other words, I am boring as hell lately.
But, I have a question for the vid people because I'm thinking about the way I mark up songs when I'm vidding. Okay, so you all know one of my biggest vidding hurdles was defeating the silent oboe in favor of the actual beat, and one of the things I use to help with that is the marking up of songs before I start. With math. And I'm wondering if anyone does something similar, or how y'all make your plans of attack for the music you use. Once I'd had enough beta sessions involving color coded charts, and people sitting with me and literally pointing things out on waveforms enough that I started to get it, is when I started doing this...and the number of times my betas were sending drafts back with LOLOBOE scrawled across them in red ink reduced dramatically.
Goes like this, I pull the music on the timeline and turn on the waveform. After listening to it several times, and watching the playhead move across the waveform, I find somewhere in the song where the backbeat is the strongest and clearest and lay down markers on the peaks where the 2 and 4 are. Then I take the number of frames between them, and this is my starting point. Half that is the approximate length of a single beat. Twice that is the approximate length of a measure. Write it down. Assuming there are no tempo changes (and there's more math involved with dealing with those, division and multiplication, argh), I now know about how long a beat and a measure are, and I can go back and find all the 1's, even when the guitars or whatever are going nuts and masking them on the waveform with confusing masses of bunched up peaks. Lay markers on all the 1's. Listen and watch through while counting the markers to make sure I haven't screwed it up completely, go back and start again if I have. Once that's settled and I have my magic numbers and markers, what I've found is that I can then concentrate on adjusting by a few frames when I lay clips to ease the flow between dark and light clips, and on the overall structure of the song, and on playing with the melody or lyrics, and deciding how I want to use the beats, rather than focusing all my time on trying to figure out where they are. Since I tend to jump around a *lot* on the timeline, especially when I'm first starting, this is incredibly useful because I can jump between points in the song without losing the thread. There's still a lot of fiddling that goes on, it's just that I've noticed when I do this everything ends up in approximately the right place, which makes refining much easier. Nowhere near perfect, but easier.
So, am I completely insane or do any of you do similar thingies?
But, I have a question for the vid people because I'm thinking about the way I mark up songs when I'm vidding. Okay, so you all know one of my biggest vidding hurdles was defeating the silent oboe in favor of the actual beat, and one of the things I use to help with that is the marking up of songs before I start. With math. And I'm wondering if anyone does something similar, or how y'all make your plans of attack for the music you use. Once I'd had enough beta sessions involving color coded charts, and people sitting with me and literally pointing things out on waveforms enough that I started to get it, is when I started doing this...and the number of times my betas were sending drafts back with LOLOBOE scrawled across them in red ink reduced dramatically.
Goes like this, I pull the music on the timeline and turn on the waveform. After listening to it several times, and watching the playhead move across the waveform, I find somewhere in the song where the backbeat is the strongest and clearest and lay down markers on the peaks where the 2 and 4 are. Then I take the number of frames between them, and this is my starting point. Half that is the approximate length of a single beat. Twice that is the approximate length of a measure. Write it down. Assuming there are no tempo changes (and there's more math involved with dealing with those, division and multiplication, argh), I now know about how long a beat and a measure are, and I can go back and find all the 1's, even when the guitars or whatever are going nuts and masking them on the waveform with confusing masses of bunched up peaks. Lay markers on all the 1's. Listen and watch through while counting the markers to make sure I haven't screwed it up completely, go back and start again if I have. Once that's settled and I have my magic numbers and markers, what I've found is that I can then concentrate on adjusting by a few frames when I lay clips to ease the flow between dark and light clips, and on the overall structure of the song, and on playing with the melody or lyrics, and deciding how I want to use the beats, rather than focusing all my time on trying to figure out where they are. Since I tend to jump around a *lot* on the timeline, especially when I'm first starting, this is incredibly useful because I can jump between points in the song without losing the thread. There's still a lot of fiddling that goes on, it's just that I've noticed when I do this everything ends up in approximately the right place, which makes refining much easier. Nowhere near perfect, but easier.
So, am I completely insane or do any of you do similar thingies?
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