Editing and running Virtual Choir Projects - Part III: Video Editing in FCPX

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to part three of this series on creating virtual prior projects as promised this part is going to go into my workflow for creating the video component of the virtual wire project in part two we created the audio mix and we mixed it down or bounced it down in logic ready for the video which i'm about to create now there are three ways the is used to create the video aspect of the project there is the basic video wall which just looks like a mass of videos all stacked up on a simple stage effect and you can see that in project hallelujah which is one of the virtual choir projects i did first in fact i think it was my first one and i also use it in make you feel my love which was one of the latter ones i always start with a basic wall with whatever project i'm doing and however advanced editing i'm doing as well i always start with a basic wall and you'll see why as this video progresses the second type of video editing you can do is what's called keyframe editing and we'll be going into the details of that in due course finally for the more advanced forms of editing we use what are called drop zone plugins and that will be the third and final part of this video showing you how to use those in the more advanced videos that i've created i've edited between all three types of editing styles and to make to make a final edit of the virtual choir project before we get underway i'll talk a little bit about system resources i've been using three computers up till now to render my video projects of for the virtual quiet projects that i've done i've used a macbook pro which has 8 gigabytes of ram i've used a mac mini which has 16 and a custom made imac that has 64. if you have somewhere around about the range of 16 you're going to find that your computer should be all right for most of the work that we're going to do any less than that and you're going to have to chop up your workflow into scenes and render them separately i'll talk about that later with the computers that i've been using so far what i'd often do is have the same project installed on multiple machines so i could be working on one scene or one computer and then allow that to render while i was working on another scene from the same project on a separate machine this is going to be important when we talk about creating your project library and consolidating and you'll notice i'll talk about that in due course in the first section of this video finally i've recently acquired a new imac computer and the specs i'll bring up on the screen now as you can see it's got quite a powerful processor as well as 128 gigabytes of ram so this machine is the machine that you're seeing me on now and i'll be editing in today whenever we are working and editing in final cut pro final cut pro will often be working in the background rendering your videos and the changes that you've made and creating the final product effectively this is very processor intensive and it can take hours on a lesser-spec machine so be prepared to have to invest quite a lot of time in this there is a way around this for lesser spec machines you can use the proxy setting which basically means that when you import your videos for the first time final cut will create lesser quality proxy videos that are just used for the editing process when you actually come to render your final edit you switch that off and that means that the final edit is rendered with the full quality videos more details on that can be found on forums to do with final cut pro anyway without further ado let's look at our first type of video editing so here we have the main window for final cut pro the first thing i'm going to do is to create a library for all our files to be stored in so this will store the video files as well as all the project files so we go to file new library and i'm storing it on an external hard drive i'm going to call it sky boat virtual choir new and i'm going to put october you can see that on the left hand side in the file window we've got the library and two folders that have appeared on the right hand side we can see the library properties we can modify where it is stored and the consolidate button will allow you to bring all files that are associated with this library in other words the video files audio files anything else any graphics you use and consolidate them into the main library folder this is really useful if you wish to move your folder your whole library to another computer to work on however i tend not to use that as you'll see why in a second let's import the videos that we need from our choir so go to import media i've navigated already to the folder that holds all of my singers videos and they happen to be 18 in total holding down the command key i'm going to select all the altos first then all the baritones and then all the sopranos numbering 18 in total before i press the import button a couple of things to note i've organized these folders or files very carefully for example after the names i've put a for altos and b for baritones and s's for sopranos you'll see why in a second the other thing is i've made sure that the files are copied to the library if you leave them in the place what will happen is they'll stay in the area of the hard drive that they're already stored in and final cut will be pointing at them and that can cause problems if you want to move your library to another machine it sort of does away with the consolidate button that we were talking about if you have it set to copy to library because it will mean that your video files will be stored in your library however bear in mind that that does take up more hard disk space import selected and you can now see why it was really important that i put those letters after the names because final cut certainly in the way i've got it set up organizes all of the video files by the date that they were sent or created so you can see these are actually dating all the way back to july but at least having the b and the s and the b and the a's and things shows us um what type of voice each video is of i'm now going to create a project file actually just before i do that i'm going to click on this little clock up here this shows you the background activities sometimes you'll notice final cut is performing quite sluggishly the reason for that is because it's doing stuff in the background at the moment it's still importing all those videos it's up to 71 and as you edit and change your project and do your work on it you're going to find that final cut pro will start rendering as well in the background that can take up a lot of system resources and unless you have a very powerful machine it can really slow down your workflow you can use something called proxy files if you want to look into that type in and do a search for proxy videos and they can really help certainly on a machine with lesser spec i'm very lucky that as i said at the very start i've got a very powerful machine so things don't take too long on here let's import let's start our project so we go up to file new project and i'm going to call this sky boat sync this is where we're going to sync all of our videos and you'll notice at the bottom in the edit window we have that project that i've just created there it is sitting at the top you can actually change the view of this preview window by clicking here and that will show you all of the videos that we have brought in and at the top is the actual project that we're looking at if i double click that that's now down the bottom i however find it easier to just see the titles of the videos because it takes up less space first thing i'm going to do is pick one of my singers that i'd like to use just like we did in the uh audio video um that i did part two we're going to pick one of the singers i'm going to synchronize everyone to and i'm going to use norma so if i bring norma in and now i'm going to do something that seems a bit bizarre i'm going to go to the generator tab and i'm going to create a solid on the generators just a black and this is literally just a a black square you might like to think of it like a picture of just black for the start i'm going to put that there i'm going to stretch it out a bit that's only for editing purposes i will remove that later the reason why we have that is because when we synchronize against the two claps that you can see in the waveform there or in norma's case two clicks it may well be that other people within the project started their video before norma and if that's the case they would need their video would need to start somewhere before norma's video and if you haven't set that black uh if you haven't uh what effectively is a placeholder beforehand you're going to have difficulty moving one of the other videos before norma's in this case right let's do some synchronizing so now we need to go back to our video and we're going to start with gail put down on top roughly line her up and you'll notice it snaps which is going to be not very much used to us because it's trying to snap her to the start so i'm going to turn snap off we will need snap later but we'll turn it off for now snap can be turned off over here no it won't do that i've got more leeway for movement i'm also going to zoom in so command and plus zooms in looks pretty good grab it and align it by eye there we go now so it's a bit easier for us to visually synchronize the clips i'm going to reduce both of them by 50 so they take up less space because at the moment girl is literally sitting in front of norma you can see as she comes in she obscures her so let's let's see both of them are now selected go up to scale and make that 50. i'm now going to select normal separately and on the x-axis move her across i'll grab gail on the right axis in fact we just need to bring the playhead into gail's video move her on the x-axis towards the right just so we can see them both at the same time doesn't matter how they're sitting as long as we can see them both at the same time just makes it a bit easier remember the x-axis is the left to right and the y-axis is the up and down essentially here it goes sounds pretty good that's i think that's fine next thing is i'm going to hit v select gail and hit v on my keyboard and that will effectively turn her video off both the audio and the visuals i call that muting there you go she's disappeared you can see she's gone sort of gray let's bring in ray we're going to reduce ray by 50 to 50 and move him across line him up by sight right you can hear he's slightly ahead a useful feature of final cut is the nudge tool or you can move each video by a frame in either direction i guess you would call it nudging and you do that by selecting the video and on your keypad you press the comma key to move it slightly one frame to the left or the full stop or period key to move it once frame to the right you can see that in action now there you go so that's the comma and that's the full stop so listen now still slightly ahead try one more perfect i am now going to hit the v key move on to will reduce will to 50 move him over so we can see let's see what this sounds like pretty cool i'm gonna move it slightly to the right good now before i go any further you can see this is taking quite a while i don't want to lose this work because there's no way of actually locking these in place now so if i accidentally grab one of these or nudge one it'll go out of time again a fail safe to stop that from happening is to align them all to what i call a synchronization point i'll show you how to do that now you can see that all of the videos are starting roughly around the same time i'm going to select all the videos that we've done so far put the playhead at a point where all of the videos are definitely playing let's say here and hit command and b that's b for blade and you'll notice what happens is it puts where that playhead is it's going to cut all the videos here we go there we go so all of the videos are now cut at that point i can now delete this delete this delete this and i'll leave that as it is for now and you can see that they're all lining up against this point here which means that if i turn the snap tool on let's say for example i accidentally nudged wheel out of alignment like that if i turn the snap tool on i can easily get him back there he is he's back in alignment and i don't have to worry about accidentally moving someone let's turn wheel off and move on to the next video i'll do a few more before i speed it up hello bye i play head in 50 i can also see that ella's video is pretty dark so i might try a quick fix on that well that's pretty cool let's try the other way maybe one in the middle right okay let's get her synchronized to that point first the easiest way to do that is if you click somewhere in the timeline and you press your up and down arrows you'll notice what happens is as you press the up and down arrow final cut moves to the next edit point see that's obviously picked up the edit point on the bottom video if i press it again it's now picked up to that edit point so we go back to the start there we go it's gone to moving up and down you can see how it's moving between those edit points in fact what i will do just to show you that i'm going to click on here and i'm going to reduce there we go the width of the video so it makes it a bit easier for you to see if i click anywhere here's up arrow a power up arrow so you can see it's moving to wherever the next edit point is so i want to get to that edit point there so down arrow down arrow and take that off now we know that she's synchronized right let's try to tidy up her video a bit because it looks like her color her obviously lighting is very different to the other videos we're going to try using the magic wand so with ella synchronized sorry lr selected we're going to try balancing the color first so the way you do that is just click to that okay then you can see it's made her a bit lighter and we're also going to match the color so we're going to try to match the color off of norma's so what it's doing is it's taking the profile of norma's and applying it to ella's here we go has it made much of a difference so let's have a look i'd say that actually looks worse so over up here i'm going to turn that off we're going to turn off match color turn off balance color um i would say actually prefer match color with balance color turned off then what i might do is lighting it by go to going to the color correction that's a bit better isn't it we're getting a lot of digital noise but there's not much we can do about that to do with the way her setup there we go good and i'll leave that we can now turn ella off and move on to the next person green val now of course the issue with zooming out like that means that we now can't see the clap anymore let's bring it back in so we can see it move her along we need to reduce her size go back to the video editing reduce her down to 50 move her over you'll note that i asked all my singers to record their videos in landscape orientation it's really important as you'll see coming up why why you tell them to record them in one orientation or the other because if you have mixed you're going to have real problems with the editing so tell your choir to either sing it record their videos in landscape or portrait it's really important that you tell them one or the other now remember by turning them off we're actually turning off the sound of the other people as well so we are literally synchronizing sue against normal i've now synchronized all of the videos all 17 videos against the 18th video norma and you'll notice that in the preview panel here whatever it's called each of the videos now has a triangle beside it and that is showing that that is present in the main project this is really useful to make sure that you don't miss someone else i can show you this if i grab for example cath if i there she is at the top of the list at the moment she's got a triangle beside her if i delete her from the project that triangle will disappear so it shows me that cathy's missing i'm just gonna command said that to bring her back so that's useful to make sure you miss you don't miss anybody out a couple of things you probably saw me doing in the speed up when the video was running fast i did a couple of color changes and corrections and a few of the other videos i did use the magic wand for i do speak to my singers about how to set up their video equipment making sure for example they don't have a backlight a light behind them or making sure that their lighting is good and that they've considered their backgrounds you get i get some very mixed results as you can see some people are really careful about their lighting for example this uh claire's lighting is beautiful i haven't had to do any correction with that some people are very dark we have for example luke's uh seems very dark and seems to be slightly backlit you'll also notice with luke that the way in which he set up his camera is slightly lower than uh where he's sitting and that produces that effect of obviously looking up on him if we go to norma at the bottom she's got some backlights and some weird effects being created by the lights in the studio um other people another person here you can see who's that heidi has got their camera slightly lower again one thing i did do in one of the projects recently is i gave them a photo the singers before they started of me sitting in front of the camera to show them what they should be looking for no backlighting the size of your head in terms of how it relates to the camera angle and these these videos are based on that photo so you can see at least everyone is close enough to the camera or reasonably similar in the way in which they're sitting at the camera same head sizes which is really important as well because otherwise you can end up having to adjust the size of the video and zoom in on them but even with all those instructions you're still going to get a mixed bag of videos where some people are lighter than the others some people are darker and you can use the the adjustments in final cut on the videos to change the on the color board the saturation color exposure and things and of course the color correction to help with that though there is a limit to what you can do right now i've got those all synchronized i'm going to zoom out from them so i'll make them smaller here we go so we can see them all and i now don't need this little bit of norma's video at the start so i can delete that and you'll notice all other videos are synchronized at the start line which is good i've chopped them all to that line i'm going to turn them all on um and this will bring about a facet of uh final cut which we need to be aware of and that is the order of hierarchy if something is at the top of this tower of videos on the timeline it will be in front of something that's lower than it now this can prove very useful as we'll see later but it can also be a bit of a pest but for now we don't need to worry about not being able to see everybody because they're all sitting obviously behind heather at the top here and then we've got norma to the left let's just listen to the claps and see what they sound like i'm not imagining that they will sound particularly together now we've synchronized it even though we synchronized it actually that's not bad i'm now going to zoom into the song and have a listen to see what it sounds like based on the video audio i'm just going to move this up a bit because we won't need that for much more but ah what i will do first is turn down the volume of all the videos so let's turn on select all the videos go up to the volume and reduce the volume of all the videos we'll take it down to about there hopefully that'll mean that when they're all playing together they won't peak let's have a listen [Music] not too bad there might be a bit of a synchronization issue i i could go through and find out whether someone is slightly out of time maybe their clapping wasn't perfectly in time at the beginning so we've had like a full synchronization the way you deal with that of course is just like we did in logic you would turn them off gradually turn them on using the v control and find out who it is and then just move them nudge them to the left or the right and then redraw that harsh or synchronization point at the very beginning let's have a listen here [Music] now of course we have to be careful here because some of those timing issues may not be as a result of synchronizing they may be a result of mistakes on the original recording and you can spend your lifetime going through trying to sort these out i'm i'm gonna leave it as it is uh bear in mind that this audio that we're hearing here is not gonna be the audio that's on the final video because we're going to import the audio that we created in uh part two of this series in logic and that we know is synchronized and sounding beautiful because of all the editing we did we're only using these videos for their visuals not for the audio so in fact at some stage i'm going to turn these all the audio off to these videos but for now i'm going to consider that to be done we now have a project called sky boat sync sync is in synchronize not as in going under the water the next stage is to create a duplicate of our project and i'm going to call this main wall the reason for creating the duplicate is twofold first we want to keep a backup copy of the work we've done so if anything goes wrong we can always grab that project and start start from at least the synchronization being correct the next thing is is remember that our three styles of editing here doing a basic wall doing the keyframe animation and using drop zones um are all going to be based on this uh first project that we've created this synchronized project they're always using that as a starting point they always use that as a starting point so it's useful to have all the videos in order and have the projects created in order so you've got backup copies but also you can see your workflow so with the main wall now we're going to need to first of all make sure that we've actually got the main wall in the editing window and you can see at the moment even though i've created the main wall and named it down here it says sky boat sync so in fact i've still got that project open i need to double click here to get the main wall open we're now going to create the basic wall that i used for the project hallelujah and also for parts of make you feel my love those two videos and i always do one of these basic rules for all of my projects because sometimes i like to use it for an individual scene within a project and anyway as mentioned this basic wall is going to form the basis of our other two types of animation the keyframe and the drop zones let's put the marker the playhead within the videos and first thing i should do is turn all the videos off bar norma at the bottom so let's turn them all off hitting the v but i'm going to keep them all selected even though they're off so we're editing on mass here i'm just going there we go now i know that i've got 18 videos and i've planned ahead i've made a plan of how those videos are going to appear on screen it looks like this so you can see from this that the 18 videos are going to appear in four rows row four at the bottom row one at the top and they're going to be five columns now because it's 18 of course i couldn't make a perfect rectangle or square um so i had to uh be a bit clever with the row one and you can see what i've done is i've put the first three videos in a block in the center so the first thing to do is going to be to map out how you're going to place your videos on screen now with the video selected we can see that norma's video is way way too big um if this is the width of the crea the screen that we have with our 1080p um we're going to need to make her a lot smaller we need to go five across so i'm going to guess that we probably want to reduce her down to 20 so with all the videos selected let's see what that looks like if i click the video editing i've got all of the videos selected we're down to 50 at the moment let's take it down to 20 and see the size that she looks i'm guessing that if i moved her over to say the left-hand side like that i'm also going to turn on the horizons i reckon i can probably get away with that i reckon i can probably get away with her being around about there what i might do is just type in here um i might just type in here a number let's see seven five seven right okay right now that number it is arbitrary i've just typed in a nice round number that was close to where it looks right remember we're about there i've gone from -757 we can move this all around later now what's going to happen now is keep the playhead in there so we can see norma and we're going to use the view we're going to go to 600 so we're going to be really zoomed in you don't have to use this little red square in the box to go back to find norma place it about there and i'm going to turn on gail so gail hit v and you'll notice gail is actually sitting over the top of norma at the moment which is not helpful so we're going to need to move gail to the right there she is and line her up so she is roughly in line it's a really random number there isn't it so i'm going to go for minus that's 373. now i'm going to make a note of these so uh let's just zoom out and explain what i mean i'm going to make a note for example that if we click on norma let's just turn the sound off actually because that's getting annoying um if we click on normal we can see that norma is obviously zero on the y-axis that means that she's sitting with the middle of her video through zero which is that line there and she is minus seven five seven that would mean that looking at our grid um [Music] column one in our grid column one in our grid is going to be -757 and at the moment we're set to zero on the y-axis as well column 2 which is gale is going to be -3 7 3 so these coordinates as it were are going to be useful for lining everything up you'll see as we go through so i've just made a note that any any video in column one is going to be minus seven five seven and any video in column two is going to be minus three seven three and i've written that down on my notes over here let's just turn that off and go back we're bringing the third video now so third video if i turn on who's this this is ray raising the wrong position move him over and of course we need to zoom in to be able to do this properly so let's zoom into 600 move across and because they're all set to y zero equals zero pixels um they are all lining up on the bottom we're just going to line them up against one another that's pretty close what's that that's a 11 it looks good so i make a note that column 3 is going to be 11. let's move along turn on the next person and they're going to be way off screen so we can't see them at the moment we're going to have to move them over and remember minus just to explain that if you're not sure how these coordinates work the reason why they're either minus or plus is if they're this side on the x-axis this is obviously minus this is plus so let's move him over zoom in now with this particular project i don't mind whether two baritones are sitting together or the altos are together or the sopranos are together if you're if you were mindful of changing those or you wanted to change that for uh arty reasons you wanted all the baritones together you would have to reorder them or at this point turn the videos on and edit them into the positions you want so for example i could i don't have to go up the list um hello i don't have to put her here i could put sheila here in fact i might do that just to go i'm not sure i won't i'll keep it simple for now but um let's just see whether he is in line and what his numbers are so this was making sure we've got um will go over to will is is he flush against there it's a bit of an odd number actually that's not bad is it that's 395. yeah i'll just keep that's 395. let's make a note of that so column 4 is going to be 395. and finally let's turn on for this row and now you can see with ella who i've just turned on now i've done some color matching and changed the color board as well just to bring her video up to the same sort of light there we go here she is all right let's bring her in line her up roughly there we go and what's that that's 779 that's a nice round number so that looks good to me zoom out and have a look at that row you can see they're all perfectly in line now and i've made a note that column one is minus seven five seven column two which is going to be gail's column is minus three seven three column four sorry three is eleven wheels row or wheels column which is column four is three nine five plus three nine five and ella you can see is over here she is seven seven nine so we're gonna need those figures for later the next thing is to highlight those videos and create a compound clip you do that by right clicking and creating a compound clip and i'm going to call this row 4 i'm going to have this as my bottom in fact let's have this as row two okay row two so select that and watch what happens all of those videos are now grouped together into what looks like one video in fact it's a compound clip the way these work is if you double click on this that's down the bottom here you can then see all the videos that are hidden within that compound clip there they are there all the videos that are hidden in that clip click the back arrow to take you back so let's organize them and the beauty of this is is i can now move that whole row to where i want it to be anywhere i like it to be so i'm moving all the videos together they're grouped together also in the preview window you can see we now have today's dates row two so that's the sign for a compound clip these are project signs and these are video signs we now are going to turn that row off like that and i'm going to turn on val this is just a matter of number crunching now because these are all going to be zero if they're not you can set them to zero i need to set vowel to she's going to be in column one so that's going to be so it looks like it's already done minus seven five seven turn on sue she's gonna be in column two we're gonna need to set her to minus three seven three according to my figures that i wrote down minus three seven three we now need to turn on heidi she's to be in 11 11 pixels to the center turn on who's this sheila she's going to be plus 393 395 in fact 3 9 five that will be to the right of the center axis and finally we'll turn on um hetty 779 with a column five wasn't it seven seven nine hang on one two three four five there we go great stuff oh hello she moved let's try that again seven seven nine now we can have a quick look at that row if everything's gone to plan you should see that they are all perfectly in line there we go it's looking good all five of them double check them and one two three four five and i'm going to group this and this can be let's see we call this row three so we have row two new compound clip row three there we go turn that off and repeat again you can see that when you've got these numbers and you've worked this all out this is really quick so this is going to be my next row -373 minus and then that's 11. you could do these on mass by selecting them and working out who you want where things but for the purpose of what we're doing it's easier to do it this way i find and just as quick oops that's going to be 779 isn't it right so that'll be row 4 compound clip row four and you can see these compound clips are populating in the browser as well and finally we have these three videos this is going to be a bit of fun in fact let's just turn vip very far off because these are the ones they're going to feature along my top row just to remind you this is going to be row one so those three that feature along the top there so what we'll do is we'll turn on let's have let's have heather on the left so heather is already in column one minus seven five seven let's put cath um in minus three seven three minus three seven three and let's put tomorrow in eleven there we go this is going to be row one so create a compound clip row one right now we have the rows all labeled and as compound clips we can begin to move them on the y axis so they stack up so first things first i'm going to start with let's see we'll start with row four so turn off row one turn on row four and i'm going to move this down to the bottom on the y axis now notice that we're dealing with this compound clip so this is all of the videos together in one clip and i'm moving it on the y-axis which is bringing it down it does look like possibly the video is slightly off screen but we can fix that later i want to take it quite low let's take it down to minus 400 that's a nice round number can i get it no i have to type it in right minus 400. you can move these up and down by dragging them but sometimes if you want to get exact numbers it's a good idea to type it in oops so what did i have minus zero and -400 right we now want to turn on row three row three we need to bring down to roughly the right position so let's do that using the wire i'll grab it and drag down to where i think it ought to be and then we'll zoom in 600 just check now bear in mind because this is sitting row 3 is sitting below row 4 you'll notice it disappears behind it so if i grab row 4 row 3 again it'll disappear behind row 4. so you've got to get it be aware of that now that looks pretty good what's that that's 184 shall i make it 184.2 what happened if i type in just 184 so yeah that works that's not created a black mark that has it if it was 185 was about minus 1 um 83 actually now you've got the black mark so let's uh which is obviously the background showing three so let's go from one to one eight four there we go i'm gonna make a note of that so row four was minus four hundred wasn't it on the y axis row three was minus one eight four so let's now zoom out turn on row two ah now it's row two because it's at the bottom of the pile is obviously going behind the other two rows you can see if i drag it down there they go so let's get it roughly in position zoom in there we go so what's that it's 31.6 should we try 31. um actually like it went let's look again 31. what happens if i type in 32. i'm looking for a light area just to make sure that that ah so it was behind so let's put 33 oh there's the black line so we want 32 32 looks like so row 2 is going to be 32 make a note of that on the y axis and finally let's turn on row one now row one is going to be off center we'll fix that in a second we're going to just do the y axis first so go in move to the top and move up bring it into roughly in the right position what's that that's two four eight let's try two four nine remember we're going away from the central point so that's going up yeah that produces a gap so two four eight would be better than that two four eight good so i've made a note that row 1 is 2 4 8 row 2 is 32 on the y axis row 3 is -184 and row 4 is -400 all on the y-axis now if we now move i'm just going to zoom out a bit to 200 there we go because we have this issue that in fact to show you that the top row is obviously not as i planned it's in the wrong position it's not in the middle so i'm going to need to move it with the make sure that row one is selected i'm going to need to move it with the x on the x-axis so let's bring it across to roughly where i think it should be there we go now the next thing is is to zoom in and check that that is actually in position slightly off center you can see so let's just move it that looks right to me what's that let's just check at the corners as well um 383 let's try 383 maybe 382 oh 384 then went wrong way that's good enough for this purpose i think good right ah you can see that's interesting isn't it although this video lines up on the left hand side on the right hand side it doesn't now that must mean that the recording device that they've used isn't as standard as the other videos so i'm gonna have to clip that the way i would do that is i need to go into row one and edit her video that's one way of doing it the other way of doing it is to edit the whole row so the way i could do that for example if i grab the right and drag it across it should there she goes so it's actually what it's doing is it's white it's cropping the whole of that row let's try it's a bit under now isn't it um seven five nine let's try seven five nine four seven seven five seven then you know that's good that looks good to me so what i've effectively i've done is i've cropped the compound clip if we zoom out now this should all look good and this is where the real fun starts because i now have there's a little arrow on the side there as well isn't there you can see the real fun is that we now have all of those four rows but again they could move out of position by accident so i will create a compound clip of all of those four rows so we're gonna have it's gonna be like russian dolls compound clips within compound clips so we're gonna put this is gonna be full basic wool there she is show you how this works we now have all of that linked together so i can move them all now there we go and i can move so let's get that central okay you can't get it central but that's probably because it's slightly too big maybe my calculations are wrong let's reduce that all to 95 that's looking better already now i'm just going to use the central point to line up it looks good i can see that there's a slight problem with this video here so i'm going to crop left until that disappears you know what good enough for me that's looking good now i'm also going to move it all up the y axis to the top to create some space at the bottom so we're looking good you can see it's how important it was to adjust the brightness of some of the videos um just to get them all looking similar so that's the next stage we have now got our main wall um built and again if you've got a computer with low resources it'll be a good idea to allow it to render now because you can see that in the background here it's paused and mine is going up quite fast but that's the beauty of having so much ram i've got on this machine as i think i said i've got 128 gigabytes of ram so a lot of ram um which is why that's moving so fast for a lesser machine if you've only got 16 or worse eight it could take hours for that to move across but i would leave that running and come back to it before we build the environment that the choir is going to sing in now for a basic effect i like to create a stage you could put a photo behind you could put a photo and drop a photo in underneath here there's nothing to stop you from doing that if you have bought some backgrounds like i have and i'll show you these again later you could put a background behind it for example i bought these backgrounds um let's try that's quite nice isn't it let's drag that underneath and you'll notice that when it's going there we go just drag it out for the full length of the video you can already begin to build build that up so you've got a background point you could put a photo or anything you like and this has obviously got various parameters that we can change if i go into the parameters you can change the color the star clusters and how they behave star speed the scale of birth the colors you can do what you like basically if i bring this in example make some [Music] red stars it looks pretty vulgar doesn't it um the lights right those stars look awful now let's go from over go for blue which i might go for the yellow spectrum there we go that's quite nice and the streaks that appear you might actually have some blue streaks that'd be nice right so you can see now that that has sort of runs in the background and you can put anything you like behind your choir i for for a basic project i create a fake stage environment to create the reflective floor i'm going to use row four i'm going to drag it in and drop it at the bottom now because it's sitting underneath the main wall you can see it's sitting behind we also have the problem that it's a hundred percent as you can see it's too wide so we need to reduce it to 95 scale just like we did with the main wall so i selected row 4 95 let's now turn the um let's just now turn the main wall off and have a look at the wall row 4. i'm going to grab a mask you can find the masks in this tab which is the effects go down to masks you want a gradative mask drop it on to drag it and drop it onto row four and you'll notice the mask is now in play we just need to flip it around i'm going to put that there and flip the top oops there we go put that there and flip the top around there's the mask and we want the top of the video to disappear like that that looks pretty good just get that and the next thing is to transform this row so it's upside down and backwards the way to do that is to go to here and click the transform tool grab the anchor point at the top and bring it down and you can see it's flipping it now we actually want it to look slightly squashed as it would be in a reflection there we go it's looking pretty good and let's click done i'm now going to turn the main wall back on v grab row four we don't need the effects open anymore and using the y axis bring it down here it is line it up so it's pretty close i like to leave a slight gap this time and we're also going to move it so it's aligned perfectly and of course we should really go in and look at this at 600 to check if it's right looks good enough looks good right now the next thing is it looks a bit like a floor but oh we've got this edge along here again haven't we let's just fix that so i'm going to have to no i wonder am i going to have to think backwards here because i flipped it which edge am i cropping am i cropping the left yes i am that's good so it's still working and that oh god there we go that looks good right was it 11 i might try 12. it's fine right i might move it up how about minus 10 oops from one wrong axis minus three rotates three eight eight minus three eight six that's more like it i quite maybe three eight seven three eight seven we'll see ah 386 right it's looking like a floor but not quite because i want to turn down the opacity what that will do is it will show the black background if i grab the row 4 turn down the opacity there we go now it's looking more like a floor turn it down too much i'm going to set it to about there that's looking really good the final job for the basic wall um is to import the audio so i'm going to go to import oops import media and the audio i think i have it sitting on my desktop actually let's have a quick look see and that's now sitting in here in our preview browser where i don't know let's have a look there it is grab the audio drag it down i am going to turn off the audio to row four let's just zoom in so we can see what i'm doing that's more like it i'm going to turn off the audio to row four because we don't need to hear that we're going to try to synchronize this audio now as far as i remember the two bars of introduction before the choir come in let's just have a listen [Music] right that's obviously from the videos [Music] but right so that moment there needs to line up with that so let's grab that and just take that across zoom in a little bit more have a listen using the full stop key to move it across still out but this is not the best audio to synchronize to because we actually want to hear them singing because um singing words that we could we can hear distinguish whether it's let's try here now what i'm doing is i'm pressing the full stop to move it to the right jog it to the right slightly [Music] now that sounds pretty close at which point what i do is i turn the audio off from the videos that's what we're seeing up here so we're just hearing the mix that i created in logic because it's a good idea to actually do this by sight so i'm going to watch the video and see whether it looks right [Music] i'm happy with that so we've now turned and muted the audio by dragging it down on the main video there it is turning it down because we don't hear that also on the reflected floor which is row four and all we're now hearing is the audio from the mix that we made in logic i'm gonna now move back to the beginning and i'm going to synchronize everybody to the start of the audio make sure snap is on over there and place the playhead in the timeline press the down arrow until it lines up with the start there we then want to highlight hold down shift and we are going to command b and that's going to make a nice sync point there so i can now delete that and i can delete that and everything is now synchronized there we go if we watch the video from the start i think we may notice something odd yes we get to see their clap of course we don't want to do that so i'm gonna do the final touches i will decide where i want the video to start i'm thinking that what it might be nice to do is actually have the video fade in so let's see how we would do that probably the easiest thing to do is to make a compound clip of the row 4 the reflected floor and the basic wall so i'm going to do that first so this is going to be a basic wall with floor there we go because now we're adjusting everything together that's good let's work out where we want it to fade in [Music] i'm going to bring it in about here so what i'll do is grab that and move it to about there now you can see why this black placeholder has become really useful because it allows us to move things around without worrying about other things changing position i'm going to go over here and grab a transition from the transition menu i want a fade it's a dissolve so going from either going to the dissolve drag drag that into the middle there and let's see what that looks like i'm going to move it slightly to the right i'm also going to enlarge it that's what i'm looking for i'm now going to go to the end of the video and just check the end of the video let's have a quick look i happen to know that it looks like some of the audio ran on from our mix so we're going to need to get rid of that that was an error when i bounced the audio down so that's not something that should be there there we go let's get rid of that so the audio clearly finishes and then the video finishes let's see what happens [Music] right at which point remember i've told my singers to pause and wait for further instruction to turn their video off if you don't do that this is when you can have people at this moment reaching in and turning their cameras off which of course is the last thing you want but let's see how it does play out at the moment oh nice glass of wine going on there excellent so what we'll do is we'll do a fade here i'm going to bring that in to about there and put another placeholder at the end i'm going to grab a solid black put a cross dissolve between enlarge it probably take it to about there let's see what that looks like excellent i'll just take it a bit further back i like that and that gives us some playout time as well okay so that's the basic wall done um you would then put your credits at the end you could put some credits in you could put some titles at the start and essentially that's all i did for project hallelujah my first virtual choir i also with all of my subsequent projects as i've already mentioned i would have done a basic wall to start with as i would have used it for at least one scene within the project where you have the wall and as i already mentioned um you're going to need to have that basic wall created to do the other style the next level of virtual choir video editing which is the key frame animation and to a certain extent you're going to need the basic wall for drop zones as well for the second type of video choir editing the next level up we're going to be looking at keyframe editing or keyframe animation and i've just prepared another copy of the main wall and i've done that by cloning as we've done before duplicating the project and i've called it key frame scenes so with that open the other thing i have done is i've made sure that i've got all of the videos stretched to the left so i've got rid of the fade in that you saw me do a few minutes ago and the fade out at the very end of the piece in fact if we look at the end of the piece you'll see that i've stretched it right out again so that will allow us if i turn the volume up of the basic wall the compound clip we can see there they are the two claps at the beginning and if i dragged in row one for example the claps line up if i drag in row three the claps line up now i'm not gonna need those for now that was just to double check that everything lined up so i did that by just dragging making sure that that is open as full as it can be we don't need that sound because we know we've got the proper sound that we made in the second video for key frame editing this is a little bit like automation in logic automation logic is where you can automate the volume so as the video as the audio is playing the volume is going up and down on a curve it's very similar in uh to keyframes in final cut pro let's see how it works i'm going to try to create uh animation where we fade into the middle um maybe the middle nine people i think i'll do it at the point of the song where it goes into the minor key for the first time so let's have a look and fight see that we can find that there it is so i'm going to hit a marker the way i'll do that is i'm going to place a marker in the basic floor so as we get to that point i'm going to hit m on my keyboard and you see the marker up here though i could label that if i wanted to we're going to call it um minor just so i know that that's i'm going to zoom in a little bit now i'll set the playhead there making sure the snap tool is on there nicely and i'm gonna over here where it says scale we need to click this button here which is add a keyframe you'll notice it turns on the keyframes for the scale on the y-axis and the x-axis because you're scaling all and if you scaled on just one of these axis it would skew the picture and distort it i'm also going to put the keyframe on for the position so we want it to start zooming in and where do we want it to finish [Music] put another marker in so right there so it's going to animate between these two points let's move from this first point to the second point put the playhead there and these marks have now appeared these are showing where the original anchor point is so if i click this for example you'll watch the playhead jump back there it goes it's jumped to where the anchor points were originally put in or the keyframe should i say keyframes so that's that's where the keyframe was put in we go back to here and you don't have to use these markers i just use the markers to help me navigate but at this point i want the animation to finish and i want it to finish zoomed in so i've set it to where i want the animation to finish i click and drag up to about there i want a bit of the floor to show and i'm also going to move it up on the y axis to get rid of the top row there we go that looks pretty cool if i now click back clicking the keyframe you'll notice that the reverse is a bit like repeat signs in music has appeared that's the next keyframe and it's jumping between those two keyframes and you can see what's going to happen that's the end of the animation the start of the animation and if i allow this to play you'll see what happens [Music] [Applause] so that's how the keyframes are working you can see it's moving as we're going through that area between the first keyframe and the second keyframe you can see everything changing up here just like it does in logic when you order [Music] so that's my first scene let's do a slightly more complicated animation i'm going to find another point where i'd like to focus on row one because row one has just disappeared so we're gonna focus on row one for a bit let's find a nice point to do that come around here i'm going to put another marker in by hitting the m button let's get the video playing and i hit m at the right point [Music] right there that's going to be my next scene i'm gonna zoom out and drop the compound clip of row one over the top so it synchronizes turn the sound off because we don't want that and i will go to that second marker with row one selected i'm holding down command and hitting b and that will cut we don't need that we want what effectively to happen we want this road to take over from the main video wall so i'm going to cut here well and turn this off this section off so let's just see what effect that has [Music] so you saw it just flip over and change over what i will then do is with this row here is i'm going to zoom in and move it over who should we start with let's start with the left hand side so that's going to be my starting point so now let's see what that looks like we jump between those two scenes [Music] i might zoom out a little bit we've lost the floor because of course this is the top row but i think it's still fine let's start there and i'm going to put in a keyframe here [Music] and at that point i will put my final keyframe in because you can see it set the marker for the first keyframe let's drag it across to oh i would actually like that to fade in rather than be a harsh cut the way you could achieve that is drag this slightly to the left and put a transition on it like that of course you notice probably what happened in the background the other video just disappeared [Music] so we might actually want to put a transition between those two as well zoom in and move it right position just before i play it i can see that it's rendering and that's because we've done some quite complicated uh animations now so it's having to work everything out and render the video you can see it's going across pretty quick let's just speed that up [Music] that's nice i like that fade [Music] so what effectively is happening here is i've got one region of the one one video that is transitioning to a muted version of itself so of course that's effectively switching it off gradually and the second row i chopped to exactly the right point synchronized it at the beginning of the chopped to exactly the right point and i've animated it using keyframes and i've done a transition fade in let's see what we want to do next right clearly that that's the end of the phrase so i'm gonna drop that there if i turn this on at this point we're going to end up with a video underneath it which we don't probably want we probably want uh what about another sweep let's do oh yeah let's go back to the main wall i think actually so blade and this side of the cut i'm going to turn back on it's going to end up with a harsh cut but let's just see what it looks like [Music] it's too late isn't it so we need to move this back a little bit and this to move this across if i drag that across there we're going to end up messing around with the timing what we need to do is switch to the trim tool because that will allow me to move that without affecting the timing allows me to move that around there we go let's have a listen [Music] that works for me i think what i'll do now is at this point i'm going to start start pulling back out to the main wall so we'll put select this video put in an anchor point a new anchor point there a new keyframe i keep calling them anchor points sorry keyframe there and we're just going to arbitrarily put another keyframe there and reduce that back down to 100 at this point grabbing it reducing it to 100 i might just type in 100 actually and reset that to zero so that means that during this section it will pull back now that looks that looks and sounds good but i think it's too late i think the animation ends too late should we have a listen i would like it to finish on the word over now thankfully you can easily edit your keyframes by right clicking on the video show video animation and you can see that's where we put those markers in there's one there and there's one here so i could stretch that to the right it looks like it with a waveform let's have a listen [Music] i'm happy with that so that then pulls back at that moment [Music] so so far if we zoom out a bit we've got the main wall pulls in it then plays a bit zoomed in before it cuts to another row which is the top row as you can see and that's animated to move from left to right [Music] [Laughter] [Music] and then we cut back to the main wall and we gradually pull out [Music] at which point i'm going to do one final form of animation using keyframes which is um where you get a bit of perspective so let's have a look at that i'm going to work out where i want it by putting a marker in and there it is i've put a marker in it's going to be that marker we're going to take the compound clip of the full basic wall and place it on so that now becomes the top of the pile make sure it's synchronized turn the volume off and we're going to use it at this point so i'm going to marker place the playhead there make sure the full basic wall is selected and command b get rid of the start because we don't obviously want that i'm going to cut the one with the floor at this point and turn it off so effectively we're cutting from one basic wall to with the floor to the full basic wall like this [Music] okay doesn't look great but that's not the end of the process i will zoom in move up in fact let's before we do that let's try distorting now distorting this i'm going to take that anchor point that point there should i say and take it up there we go and i'm going to bring this one down it's going to allow me to do it there we go i might just bring them in slightly as well right 100 move it up slightly just to get my starting point move it slightly as the start move it up slightly more actually okay so get where i want it to start so that's this new wall this new scene and i now we have our starting point of this scene we're going to put in the keyframes so put keyframe and keyframe there so we've got keyframes for the scan all and keyframes for the position work out where we want the animation to finish let's find the point we wanted to finish i'm going to just place slightly further than i want it would actually want it to finish and suppose i will do a fade out afterwards i'm going to put a marker there and i'm going to drag the video now because we've got those anchor points at the start i'm going to set the finishing point but i'm just going to make a note on screen roughly where the video is at that point so i'm just going to make a note that the video is along that line there i'm going to drag it because you'll notice what's happening is it's going down so start where's the beginning of the video there i'm going to take it up to roughly the same point let's just flick between those two angle points is it roughly there it needs to be a bit higher doesn't it so let's just take that a bit higher flip between those two i mean not anchor points uh keyframes not bad so just checking again that looks right so what's gonna happen in this section [Music] okay let's watch that [Music] flora will keep and we're gonna put a cut in this video here the full basic wall and cut back to the main wall we'll do that by doing that and that get rid of that and turn this on put a cross dissolve there and i'm going to put a cross dissolve here now this is going to cause a bit of an issue because there's nothing for it to dissolve to so it's going to dissolve at the beginning as well we can delete that because we don't actually want that we want it to be a harsh cut i'll zoom in this is command and plus and i'm going to stretch that out and stretch that out and move those into position [Music] just wait for it to render right let's see what that looks like [Music] okay so we've got some basic animations there three types of basic animations and of course you could do any manner of animations with keyframes uh if you're using a machine with lesser spec than mine in other words you've got less ram what i'd recommend is each of these scenes you render as a separate video so you effectively a bit like bouncing down in logic you render each scene and this is going to become particularly important when we get on to the third style of editing using drop drop zones but if you create a file in other words you've rendered a final video of each of the scenes and then bring them into another project and stack them up against one another and line them up again you'll find that your machine will probably use the resources will be used better and you won't have so much of an issue because it gets to the stage like for example on my laptop that if i tried to do this on my laptop my laptop would be crashing by now um just because i don't have enough ram in it so what i would have done is i would have effectively rendered this part of the song i'd render the first part of the song by doing this i would click that arrow and change it to the range tool i go as far as that i would create a master file of that and call it scene one click next you can see it's quite a big file already you can see all the spec i would then do an another selection which overlaps with this and render that and then when i've got um all of the scenes done i would combine them again in a new project that's the way i've certainly done it on a laptop and it if you've got minimal resources that can be a way of doing it but you can see from this section that there's quite a lot of scope for using these keyframes from zooming in and out if i just turn the sound off so it doesn't become so much of a distraction from zooming in and out that we had where is that right at the start we then have at this stage we had a cut to the top row which then moved from towards the left we faded actually didn't we between those two with the transition and we then cut back to the main wall but it was zoomed in and it zoomed out again using keyframes and then we cut to another version of the full basic wall that i had used the transform tool on and we animated it moving diagonally across there it is we then had a nice fade back to the main wall so there's just some ideas with keyframes and remember we said earlier that the hierarchy of the way it reads clips what's placed in front of what is really important and useful at this point because we were able to put row one above the basic wall and cut to it because it's sitting above it's sitting in front and that's where that feature of final cut pro is really useful for the final part of the video we're going to look at drop zones now drop zones as you'll see are effectively plug-ins that i've purchased from other sites third-party sites and the reason why they're called drop zones is you literally drop your videos into these zones that are pre-assigned in the template you'll need to download a series of drop zones or plug-ins from a site of your choosing the ones that i use are motion v fx has some good drop zones for uh choir walls or for video walls as does um the this this particular site pixel film studios this is really good as well and you can see the ones that i have already ordered if we go back to um view all and i'll show you where you can find them since i ordered these which was back in june july time they've actually changed the the offering because they used to have all of their walls in separate packages and they were quite expensive they were about 29 per wall whereas now what they have done is they've combined all of those packages into one product which is this one here the final cut pro 10 walls and you can see if i just get this playing the type of uh the type of effects you can create with these drop zones i'll just turn the sound off there and get this plane in the background you can see the type of effects you can create from video walls that animate outwards to circles like i use in the credits to this video um there are loads of templates and what's really nice is they've combined all of the previous uh plugins into one product now so it's only 29.95 you download this you pay for it you download it and you install it and then it will appear as either a generator or appear as a titles depending on what product you're using within final cut pro so that's the first type of wall that i use or the the drop zones that i use the other type is from motion vfx and these were quite expensive these were 79 when i bought them these have less functionality but they're much easier to use so you can see the type of effects you can have with that particular product and again you'd need to purchase it and install it on your machine to show you how drop zones work i'm going to create another copy of our original synchronized video now or project now we don't need the keyframe one anymore we can just use the synchronized one so let's create a duplicate of that and i'm going to call this drop zones open it and this was where we started after we've done all our synchronization now as i said in the section on keyframe if you have machine of low spec this is going to cause horrendous problems with your machine it'll bottleneck and it will start slowing down and you won't be able to work and it will start crashing and all the rest of it and you will have to organize this by scene and render each part separately otherwise if you try to play the whole video at once and use drop zones throughout for every single scene you're likely to find that your computer won't cope with it this one does because i've got 128 gigabytes of ram plus a fast processor but if you're dealing with a less ram or a slower processor you're going to enter problems and what i was doing on my previous videos before i bought this machine this machine is new and i was read editing each part each scene rendering it and then doing exactly the same as what i showed you in the previous section putting it all back together so let's see how drop zones work we're going to have to do something slightly bizarre to start with and that is because of affordable within drop zones we actually have to stretch these out to the start so although these are cut to this lovely line that we created the actual stars of heather's video is all the way back here and it's really important that we stretch them out to the start if you don't do this you're going to find that you're going to have synchronization problems within your drop zones your animation and it's because the makers of these drop zones were not oops didn't want to do that we're just stretching the start out there we go not moving it we're stretching it the makers of these drop zone plugins were not really uh designing them for virtual choirs we are actually sort of uh using a technology for something it's not invented for because the the concern of the makers of the video plugins the drop zone plugins well to be able to for people to be able to create video walls where synchronization between the individual components of that wall was not a priority so you'll notice that the demonstrations that we saw on the web page the people in the videos there was no synchronization in what they were doing there was no intent for that synchronization either so because of course in a choir we want all of our videos to synchronize we want everyone to be singing at the same time the same notes we have to play the system slightly and to do that you're going to need to do exactly what i'm doing here stretching these all out let's see come on stretch to the beginning there he goes because otherwise it will not work and you're about to find out that using drop zones is very cumbersome so let's decide where we want the first drop zone scene to happen i'm going to pick a point do it there i'll put a marker there [Music] right we now need to find our drop zones i've already got them installed they'll be under titles and generators and you can see i have the pixel film studio fpx walls so there are all my drop zones there and for the other product the more expensive one that my video will is there and i'm going to use this one to start with just to show you the process so let's pick which drop zone we want now you've got to be careful because they will sometimes not have enough uh zones for you to drop all your videos in or they will have too many um i quite like that we'll do that for the start um it's going to be a bit overkill for the mood of the music but hey ho let's drag it and drop it to that point and you'll see as it animates i'm gonna turn the sound off now so it doesn't disturb us as it animates you can see the zone numbers appearing so this animation favors six seven eight nine and probably ten i'm guessing it's that row so i'm just going to start filling the drop zones from there so the way we do this is we need to take the the play head to the back and i'm just going to put the playhead to the back there so that's where we're going to want to put all the zones in put the videos in and it was six seven and eight so i'm gonna find that's drop zone one drop zone two three as is four five six if i grab if i touch this i will click this arrow for drop zone six and i will put heather in that drop zone and what has what you have to do is after you've clicked it your arrow will turn into this little hand and you need to synchronize it exactly with the start of the drop zone get this wrong and it won't synchronize correctly so click and then click apply and you can see what's happened in the preview window up here she is now in drop zone six drop zone seven let's put kath there she is and drop zone eight we'll put tomorrow and drop zone nine we'll put it's got to be exactly on the line exactly at the starting point drop zone 10 there we go there's any further than 10. so the other one we're looking at underneath you can see 13 14 12. it looks like 12 11 so we probably want 11 and 12 13 and 14 don't we so let's find those i'm just going to do this randomly now i'll just pick random people so let's put in justin now i've turned the sound off but i can see that some people are not quite sitting central in their drop zone so you can edit that for example who what drop zone is that that looks to me like it is tamara isn't it so tomorrow if we find where tamar is she'll be listed somewhere here there she is and on we'll move her slightly on the x-axis there we go that looks better so you can move people up you can if they're too small you can zoom in there we go move her up a little bit that looks a bit better already and you have certain amount of uh animation that you can do not animation the changes you can make to the environment the published parameters is called you'll notice that it it faded in it kind of built in let's have a look at that again if i turn the building off it just appears so it's a bit like a transition now personally i don't like the shine at the top so we can turn that off we can turn the shine off here shine is it here i can remember let's just play with these there we go so you can see the effect that's having um you can turn the blur off if you don't like the blur so you watch the edges you get the vignetting around the edge just as you would with the camera lens and you can set the radius and range of the vignetting there you go pulling it further in so that will then change the the mood of your video if i turn that all off you can get an idea of what it would look like without so let's turn that off let's turn vignetting range i think we turn it there we go and i'm going to turn blur off and and we can turn the shine off as well at the top so that produces a more natural look and again you can turn the build out off as well so that's one drop zone that's from the my wall package and of course you've got loads of options here if i set up another one very quickly just to show you the type of things you can do [Music] let's find one that we like again this is a bit over the top you can see the type of effect that's going to have with our videos is there this spinning one this one might cause a bit of a problem because if you look at how thin they are we're going to get very little of the person showing in those we might do better to have something even that that's more for portrait videos isn't it rather than landscapes you have to be a little judicious in your choices i'm gonna go for what's the one we just have we had that one let's try that's quite nice i'm going to drop it in a random point we're just doing this at random points now so again set the marker at the start click your video wall or drop zone plug in and how many have we got here looks like we've got quite a lot so i'm going to start at the bottom of my range now and i'm going to just click these all in and speed up the video so you don't have to watch this generally speaking when i'm mapping out and planning a video what i do is i make sure that everyone features at least once or twice um in the sea in in throughout the video so you get they at least appear in one scene so you don't end up favoring one row of people over another just because they're placed in an easy place to reach in the group of videos um so be mindful of that because obviously everyone wants their five minutes of fame okay with that done let's have a look at what it looks like it's a bit juddery because the computer hasn't finished rendering it yet but you can see the effect and again i have certain amount of control over that i can for example with this particular one i can turn the shine off and turn the other features off at the top so if you don't like the the shine let's turn that down to zero the blur i quite like in the background if you turn that off you can see that they come into focus i quite like that blur um bring in some vignetting see it just adds vignetting to the side if you quite like that that will create a different effect as it goes through so there were the drop zones in my video wars let's have a look at the ones from pixel studios we have lots of options here this one only has one drop zone this is going to be interesting if i grab that and put that in place and this means it's only going to feature one video i put this in a random position obviously you would want to choose in your video which where the scene would start so i'm going to go to the start of that drop zone and i'll populate that single drop zone and i think you'll see what happens here the controls look very different at the top but if you go down you have the same same icon that you click on i'm going to put where is she i put heather in there click ok and you can see what it's done the reason why you can see the other videos behind is because they're still switched on what you'd have to do is go through all of this and turn them off by pressing the v button and then when you're in here of course you're only going to get to see uh heather in this case um so you can see she's being split up and you i'm sure that there's going to be some options of what you can do here let's see because i don't actually use this one you've got soft box options environment reflectivity you can see that's changing the floor as i change sweep across the fact that the background is on or off we can turn the background off an environment off and you're going to see that if you had photos behind it that would make a big difference and you turn the floor off and let's have a go at animating her slightly so this does have some functionality and you can see the keyframe markers are here as well so you can even use keyframe animation with these we're going to go here and you turn on edit mode and you set camera mode to start where would you like the camera position to start so the starting position we're going to set the x-axis so you can see this matrix appeared we're going to use these actually we're going to grab that and you can see it's moving it so let's start her over there i'm going to twist her slightly as well there we go so she's slightly there and just push her back forward a bit that's going to be the start point by the end of this scene and you'd need to work out exactly where you wanted it to end you go we want to be in a different position this is a bit like automatic keyframes you go to end camera let's decide where we want her to finish we'll bring her down again and put her over there all right now if i now go back to set camera animation um you'll see how she moves across that space and then you would turn edit mode off um to render your scene we might use this this one actually now this has got 33 drop zones this is what i use for the animation to the start of this uh video series so let's see what it looks like at the moment it does absolutely nothing and you can see that we have 33 drop zones to fill this is going to be a problem when we've only got 18 videos and you can't unfortunately switch them off with this particular one but i'll just give you a demonstration of how it works i'm just going to line up i'm just going to populate those drop zones really quickly i've now filled all the drop zones and as you can see the issue here is is that because of the shape of the drop zones in this particular uh video wall it's not it's not favoring our landscape setting of the videos i could theoretically reduce all of these down let's have a look for example at one of the drop zones at the front there we go you can see what happens there i could reduce them all down to the same percentage such as 35 what that looked like on here let's have a quick look that might be one solution there we go that sort of works it makes a a narrower ring if we zoom in and have a look at that that's not bad it could work but um if we want to stick with it as it is this is where you have to be careful with the type of uh plugin that you choose with your drop zone because it may will suit your videos it may not if you wanted to animate that first thing i might like to do is change the color of the background so i have a black background so it matches the rest of the project so let's go in and change the background we want the color in the background to be black and you can see you've got the reflection there you can turn the floor off while you're dealing with the floor you can deal with the reflectivity i like it a bit darker and the blur how blurred it is there we go i quite like that and the fall off is obviously how the reflectivity falls off in the distance and you have the other functions there spacing has the effect of pulling the videos apart as you can see which you might actually want i quite like that actually rather than having them touching having a little gap between each one and you have uh functionality to be able to change the opacity of different areas of the wall group rotation that has the wall animating now this could be useful for us couldn't it because we could animate yes using the keyframes that's side rotation ah that's interesting so that produces an interesting and as you can see i'm just playing out here i quite like the idea of that starting where was it i like the idea of the wall starting flat and then turning into this circle so let's go to the very start and i'm going to just make a note of these numbers on the side rotation here so we're going to got minus 10.9 and 10.9 just make a note of those i'm going to change them to zero i'm going to put a keyframe at the start of the video so we've got a keyframe on both of those pull it halfway through and then type in that minus 10.9 and 10.9 actually let's move this one slightly later so it takes slightly a longer time to get to there so that's going to be 10.9 there so this keyframe is going to be slightly later so they won't both arrive at the same time let's see what that looks like okay the reason why it's getting jagged is because it hasn't finished um it's judder is because it hasn't finished rendering yet so we better leave it to render so you can watch it i'll just speed it up so that zooms in right it's a bit too fast and for some reason i haven't got it actually getting into the right position r should have been 10.9 so we need to go back where is it back where's the keyframe where it should be 10 10.9 there we go now we're now we're in the right position so i got that slightly wrong but what about from this point here we want it to spin i think we can do that by using the keyframe here if we put a keyframe in the group rotation and then by the end here we'll spin it slightly how many degrees should we have it's um 99 degrees so that would then have the effects of spinning slightly we could actually take it up let's take it to 130 that would be a very fast spin then won't it so you see what's going to happen is it's going to spin through that part of the video again using the keyframes just like we did in the second part wait for that to render you can see how the rendering is doing because this dotted line is showing you the bit that's yet to be rendered and every time i move or try to edit what happens is final cut pauses the rendering for example if i start moving it will go into pause mode as it has just done so it's sometimes advisable to just leave it okay let's watch it back right that's obviously overkill on so many levels but we don't really need to worry about that because this is just experimenting with the drop zones but it kind of works doesn't it what you probably want to do is stretch this drop zone out so it's longer and have that rotation happening over a longer period because of course if it happens over a longer period then it's going to be slower if we go into show animation and i think it's that's the there we go so we want to stretch that out to maybe the end of that section it's going to be a very very slow spin and it pauses just before the end let's wait for that to render notice that i've turned on the original video sitting underneath the reason for that is so we can have some sound uh drop zones do not take on board sound no sound is transferred into the drop zone when you put the video in there so if you want to hear your sound you can have to turn your videos on but bear in mind that you would be rendering probably each one of these little scenes and mixing them into a main video as i showed you before when working with the drop zones the other thing you've got to be aware of is you're working in three-dimensional space so looking at the controls you don't only have a position on the x-axis and y-axis you also have a position on the z-axis so the x as we've said before is left and right the horizontal the y is the vertical the up and down and your z is your back and forth so it's your third dimension you'll also notice angle of view of the camera and what that means is the type of sort of lens you're using for example if you're using a 20mm lens you would have a wide angle shot whereas if you're using 45 it'll be slightly narrower but it will appear more zoomed in and if you're using obviously a higher powered lens it's an even narrower field of view so there are other things you can adjust this seems to render now so let's see what it looks [Music] actually that doesn't look too bad it's still overkill but at least by slowing it down by stretching that time out by stretching the drop zone out it says it's made it it's made to spin slower which is nice again this was an arbitrary choice over where i placed this drop zone in if i was doing this in reality i'd pick my where i was going to put the drop zones very carefully let's do one more to finish off it's a shame that they don't label their drop zones or their yeah their drop zones more consistently as it's quite difficult to tell what you're looking at some of the drop zones that they've got on here will animate themselves others won't so for example this one here 21 if i select it and preview it doesn't animate at all whereas other drop zones will actually self animate and already have animation built in let's have play with this one though anyway drop it in randomly and i'm just going to spend a few seconds populating all those drop zones so here goes the issue we have with this particular set of drop zones is we have more drop zones than videos so i have copied and pasted the three people at the top here into the bottom what i mean by that is i've actually placed their videos twice they're synchronized so those three drop zones drop zones three four and five as well as the final three drop zones and then i'm going to turn off three four and five so if we go down we should better turn off one two three four and five doesn't look brilliant but it's better than having empty drop zones or duplicates i would like the background to be dark so let's change the background to dark so it matches my other wall do we want the floor on or off i quite like the floor on but i like the blur a bit more and i'm going to turn off the reflectivity slightly reduce it there we go percentage we could render that scene exactly as it is because it looks quite nice with the wavy wall it's not animating but it still looks a bit more interesting than the basic wall that we created or we could use the camera angles to animate it let's have a go at that so if we select the drop zone turn on edit mode and you'll notice the 3d floor appears and we have these three controls so we need to set the start position of the camera and we're going to then grab this control and just see how it works and i'll drag down and i'll drag up and i'll drag left and right so that's the movement of that control the second control moves like that and round and the third control is your z axis by the looks of things let's reset all of that so we're all reset and we're going to set our start position so i quite like the idea of the start position being slightly angled up but quite close so we'll change the camera angle and we'll move it over to that position we then go to set camera end and we're going to do a very similar thing but moving it outwards and pulling the camera back a bit more downwards there we go if we now set it back to camera animation and we can then see what the effect would be as it zooms across if i turn off edit mode we then need to wait for it to render there it goes i quite like the idea of it actually changing orientation at the end as well so look at the um end press it back a bit flipping a bit like that so it goes so we view it through the floor let's see what difference that makes if i was happy with that you would then turn off edit mode and allow it to render so it will produce the the fill effect you may have to turn off the floor with this one because we actually go through the floor as the animation happens but we can experiment with that in a second and here is that final scene let's watch it yes i thought so as we pass through the floor we obviously have a bit of a problem because you can't see the animation anymore so we turn the floor off that should improve that again that's pretty extreme but it gives you a sense of what you can do you're probably beginning to realize now that there's a lot of trial and error with the parameters on here and that's because i'm actually not totally on top of which what each parameter does i tried to search for some decent instructions on the developer's website and they are non-existent pixel film studios has a few videos that show you basic control but it's very very quickly done and they don't really go into any form of detail so i'm afraid you will need to do quite a lot of experimenting so work out the exact effects that you want and that brings us to the end of this video and indeed this series on creating virtual choir projects i hope it's been useful to you just before i close i just thought i'd recap on one really important point because i've recently changed computer i've gone from a computer that had 64 gigabytes of ram which was my first imac so this one that has 128 and indeed i was doing some of the virtual choir projects on my macbook pro which only had 16 gigabytes of ram if you're lucky enough to have a really powerful machine like my new one then you will be able to use the drop zones in one large project which will be the entire length of your song so you'll be able to put the drop zones in at the start of a scene and put an end to the scene and then put another drop zone in for another scene or use any of the forms of animation keyframe animation that i have shown you if you're using a lesser machine with a less ram like for example my laptop when i do it on my laptop i had to render each scene separately and then re-align them in a new project so for example i would use a drop zone for one scene i'd render that scene into a new video i'll then sort out my next scene render that into a new video and then you compile all the videos lining them up and as you can i guess it's quite an arduous process but i'm afraid that's the nature of the beast with the keyframe animation you should be able to do most of that on a reasonable spec mac i certainly was able to do it on my 64 gigabyte mac and also to a certain extent on my imac just be prepared to have lots of time available for your machine to do the rendering between each edit that you do anyway i hope you've enjoyed watching the series and take care see you very soon [Music] you

Channel: Guy Bunce

Views: 8,638

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Id: rd8__Z1EPCQ

Length: 115min 13sec (6913 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2020