How To Create A Virtual Choir [Final Cut Pro X Tutorial]

if you're looking for a way to easily create virtual choir videos for your church you've come to the wrong place yeah this is gonna be hard sorry welcome to - studio my name is Nathan with me as always as my choir director Ronald he's back there he's blurry kind of like a sasquatch today we're gonna look at creating a virtual choir video in Final Cut Pro so I recently created one of these for Central Christian school the grade school I lead worship at on Fridays the sixth graders of that school typically sing this song at the graduation unfortunately this year for obvious reasons they weren't able to do that so all the teachers got together and they sang the song for them we put it together in a virtual choir video and then sent it out to all the graduating sixth graders online [Music] so we're gonna use Final Cut Pro today and I'll show you how I put it together if you're more familiar with After Effects you should go check out practicalworshipblog.com and After Effects and I think he has a free After Effects template you can download as well so go check that out it's probably far easier than what I'm gonna do here today but I really have time to learn After Effects it's I'm gonna tell my list I really want to it's like right behind learn French and memorize the Bible next thing right after this but I didn't have time to learn After Effects right now so I used Final Cut Pro which I already know how to use and it worked and it worked well and it took forever but forevers I mean about 12 hours total which honestly for a complicated video isn't that much time you are gonna need a dedicate large chunk of time to create this virtual choir video but it's gonna look awesome and sound awesome too obviously although that's less in my control and more in your singers step one of course is to get all the videos so you're gonna need to send out some sort of track or video for people to sing along with in our case we had an instrumental track and the music teacher at the school recorded a video of herself kind of choir directing over this track you're gonna need some way to keep everybody together on the same key so you will need some sort of backing track to send out to everybody and then they'll need to use headphones and sing along with it they have to use headphones because you don't want that backing track to bleed into the videos audio you want to add that in later so it's nice and clean I would also make sure you specify to them how to shoot the video which apparently you have to do nowadays because everybody wants to shoot their videos vertically ah alright it doesn't really matter it's whatever you want to do but tell them we need a horizontal or we need a vertical or it doesn't matter because we're gonna have both on the screen and you also might want to specify a recording standard we did not do this because I didn't actually foresee it being a problem which it ended up being the problem was two of the people somehow managed to record their videos in 25p which isn't even American Standard I don't think and 32 kilohertz audio which I've never seen a phone recorded before but that cost huge issues it that 32 kilohertz kilohertz audio ended up being like an entire measure of the song behind by the end of the video so I had to do some time adjustments with those so make sure everyone knows to record in say 1080p frames per second you can specify if you want to does not big deal with since you're putting them all together and then make sure they're recording in 44 or 48 K audio at least should be standard on most phones and cameras but you never know so now that we have all those beautiful singing videos we need to organize them and plan how to use them so we're going to create a base canvas to use in our video it's gonna be a template with squares on it that tell us exactly where the videos go I created mine in photoscape X worked pretty well you can really create this in any program that you can add boxes to and organize them you can do it in PowerPoint Microsoft Word although that'd be a bit difficult you could do an apple pages you could do it in Photoshop any software you can just create boxes move them around and make a template I'll show you mine in photoscape so here is my template since you're probably gonna want to create this video in 4k you want your template at least 2500 pixels wide you're gonna delete it later so it's not a huge deal but so mine is like 6000 pixels wide I always go too big what are you gonna do it's just a large black background and then all these grey boxes are just single boxes so we got all our videos in and we ended up with 20 videos which is a lot so we kind of plan and looked and see what we got to put in we knew we needed at least one vertical because someone was doing sign language and we couldn't crop it we also needed we needed one really because they had signs on the wall behind them that needed a few read I'll assume with your video like mine most videos can just be cropped and however you want them you just need a head in the video which can be whatever aspect ratio you want so the biggest thing is to look for any that need to be a certain width or height add those in first and then fill in the rest of the spaces with whatever shape or aspect ratio works so each of these gray spaces is for a video obviously so once we get this in Final Cut Pro we'll be able to crop and place our videos without a lot of guessing once you finish this you just want to export it as a large JPEG file and then we'll move over to Final Cut Pro and get to the nitty-gritty and here we are in a Final Cut Pro terrified yet wait don't leave yet it is exactly as complicated as it looks we have 20 videos there's a lot going on here and putting this part of the video together is going to be the majority of our time spent our goal here is just to get all of the voices in and synced and cropped to the right place so that we can then export a single video file that contains all of the videos and voices that'll make our life much easier later to add titles and corrections and all that sort of thing so the first thing we're gonna do is drag in our template image that's gonna be the first thing we put in when we do that it'll probably ask you what sort of format do you want this project to be in you probably want a 4k file since you have so many video files going and do this just gives you a bigger canvas to work with so after we have our template file in as our base canvas if you will then we're gonna add in our audio track our backing track we're gonna add this in so we can sync all these together and then once we export it we'll get rid of that audio track so we just have voices so here I have my Shalom recording track right under my base canvas if you have those two things then you're ready to start adding the actual singing videos so you can see here in my file browser I have all the teachers videos in a single folder I just dragged this full singing folder to the final cut event and it created its own kind of subset of videos in Final Cut we started with one person then added two more than two more than three more than four more so it kind of built into a large choir if you're gonna do that sort of thing you should plan earlier who will be first who has the best voice who was leading it etc then we're ready to add our first singer so here's sort of the process you'll do with every video you add the first thing you'll do is drag the video into the timeline so we'll drag our first singers movie in right there so you can see there we have her video just large on the screen obviously not how we want it to end up I didn't really add much video correction or audio correction to the individual videos unless they really really needed it because it was it was fine just looking like a bunch of cell phone videos everybody knew that's exactly what it was and it looked great that way so I didn't color correct I didn't really audio correct at all unless it desperately needed it I did do some color correction later on that single video file but we'll get to that so now we need to sync up our audio since you can't hear any of the music in the video it's a bit difficult it's also a bit difficult because singing is not very percussive as opposed to you know guitar playing or drums obviously piano so it's harder to see in the waveform where notes start and stop so a good tip is to pick a percussive word on a prominent beat pick a percussive word on a prominent beat for me I picked the word 2 because 2 is always percussive and it was on a 1 so I knew everybody was more likely to hit it right on the beat they needed to so that gave me something to see in the waveform and then I synched all of the videos up to that 2 and it worked out very well so I'm going to zoom in if you don't know where zoom in is it's a little symbol right here I'm gonna zoom in both up and down and side to side so I can see the waveform better bump up the audio so again I can see the waveform better and here you can see her waveform of her singing so I'm just gonna trim off all the silence at the beginning you can just do that by grabbing the beginning of the clip and dragging so well just listen to the audio see what we get all right so we know we need her around here on this audio track you can hear there is a lead piano part which makes it easier because I can kind of sync up their vocalist to the lead piano part all right so if I play that you should hear that lead piano part in their hair singing along with it [Applause] [Music] sounds pretty good alright so we've got our first video synced to the audio that'll help us immensely with the future videos now I need to scale the video down crop it and put it in the right place on our template so how we do this is we want to transform and then crop transform is this little button right here if you do not know click that and you'll see a box with dots around the video and then you can just grab one of the edges and drag it and make it smaller so I am going to make the video fit vertically about the right size that looks pretty good then I'm just gonna place it on top of that square where I want her video to be in then I will crop so it fits exactly in that box so you can crop two ways one way is to switch over here to crop instead of transform you could certainly do that but I found it easier just to use these crop sliders here on the side so those are in your video effects panel on the side I also find it was nice to zoom in on this like so if you need to move around your images a little red box over here see what my hand is you drag that what you want it so now I just crop I want bring this in and out so left I just want to match it to the gray that's pretty good right same thing and there we go doesn't have to be exact because we're gonna delete this template and you won't see any of the gray boxes in the end you're just trying to get the videos to look even top-down like so and bottom I believe is already yep in the right place so there we go click done when you got it right we got our first video cropped and in where we need to go you can see how this would be very difficult without a template much easier when you know exactly where the video should go so finally we just want to crop or clip to exactly where we want it to pop into the video and then we are done so I'll play it and see if it's how I want [Applause] yes it's exactly what else so we've got our first video done one down nineteen to go so this is the process you're gonna do every time just got to do that 19 more times we're good to go they take no time at all like eight hours so I'm not going to show you me doing this with all twenty videos I can show you bringing the next one here did the same thing [Music] [Applause] so as you add more and more videos you'll have to adjust the audio levels a bit I found that as I brought more people in I needed to bring down the beginning people lower and lower because they needed to be pretty high in the beginning since they were the only voice carrying it but then as more people came in the volume just started going up so as I brought down the volume of those beginning people and it kind of evened everything out you don't know how to do audio automation in Final Cut it's actually fairly easy you'll want to go to your audio waveform and then hold down the option key and click where you want your fade to start then find the way you want your fade to end same thing hold that option and then click and you'll get these two little points and then you just bring down one of them and that'll create an audio fade for you you can create more points and more points to go up and down you also have to adjust the individual volumes to get a nice blend of everybody there aren't really any secrets to this you just got to play around with the levels of all of the videos I didn't actually have to do a lot as I brought them in they kind of evened out well I did just kind of bring everybody up to a similar volume level on the waveform so I just kind of looked at how high their waveform was and brought them up higher and then I just listened to whichever voices were standing out or which ones I couldn't hear it all brought him up and down until it was a nice blend now let's talk about a few issues you may have you might have a video that's just really dark or really bright if that's the case you can just go to this symbol here and that's your color correction and then at exposure you can adjust how the video looks this is your mids your lows and your highest as you can see there on that top video you also may have a video that's volume is just too low to hear even when turned all the way up if that's the case you want to go to your audio effects which is this little button right here will bring out this audio effects pop-up you can go down to audio and then levels and then you can either add a compressor which will compress the audio or you can just add gain which is basically another volume knob to bring it up there even higher so you just grab that and drag it to whichever video you want it on and then you go to this audio effects panel over here you'll see gain and click on this button right here that'll bring up your control window and you can add some volume up or down with this gain knob so you really should only need that if you have a video the audio is just too low to hear even when bumped all the way up and finally hopefully you won't have this issue but if you do have any video sent in the wrong format like 32 K you will need to adjust those the two videos we got in 32k did not work at all audio wise because it's such a different sample right that by the time we got to the end of the song they were like an entire measure behind so you'll actually need to squash those clips or speed them up since I wasn't speeding him that much it didn't seem to affect the audio key or anything if you speed them up too much then you'll get the high-pitched mouse ball you need mean liking it with the with the speeding up video you don't want to talk about you didn't seem to affect it too much so to do that you want to click on the clip you need to adjust then you can go up top to modify and then retime then you'll see slow or fast we need to speed ours up a bit there's only two X option I just grabbed 2x and then I bring it out so you can see it shrunk the clip way down here because that's sped it up I'm just gonna drag this arrow out until I get to the end of the song so as you do this you kind of need to resync the audio so i'll find a note that i want to sync at the end like so go back check all the points of the audio see if it's syncing or knots I found that for a video that was shot 32 kilohertz audio I needed it bed up to about a hundred and four percent you can see here it says 102 I needed about a hundred and four so that can be a starting point for you can drag it out to 104 sink back up the audio and then make sure it's not lagging behind at any point hopefully you won't have to deal with that problem you'll get everybody to record the videos in the right audio sample right hopefully alright so it's been like four and a half weeks since you started editing and you finally got all the videos in an audio synced up now maybe like I did you want to do a similar thing at the end as you did at the beginning where people jump out not all at the same time but one at a time if you want to do that simple you just drag the end of the clip like this to wherever you want it to cut out the only tricky part here is that when the video cuts out obviously the audio cut out and it won't sound very good if audio is just jump out like in the middle of lines when you're doing it after the music is ended then it won't matter if there's no more sound but if they're kind of jumping out as the singing is still happening you're probably gonna want their audio to stay in to keep that choir sound so what I did is I expanded the audio so you can right click expand audio or you can just hit control s ctrl s and you'll see our actual audio waveform will separate from a video it's not actually separated it's still connected you can just see it and then I can drag the end of our audio in and out so that way I can keep her audio going while their video cuts out and then I also add a fade on the end of their audio now you do that is if you click on the end of the audio you'll see a little dots and - left and right arrows you just click and drag that back and it'll automatically add a fade-out to your audio yep yeah to do that with all 20 videos as well this is why this takes a while and that was it we were done we were good to go you can see here I actually added a title that's because I wanted a title to appear behind the videos as they went out which obviously couldn't do once it was a single clip so I added that in here but if you don't need any special behind the clip titles then you're pretty much done so go through check all of the video make sure they're synced to make sure you're exactly how you want them and then once you're ready to export you have two small steps number one you want to add a black background over your template you don't want to delete your tablet because that's your base camera so if you press delete on the template all of your videos will be deleted don't do that we're just gonna add black on top of it so we don't see it anymore so to do that you're gonna go to the title area of Final Cut Pro right here down to generators down to solids and then custom will be black so I'll just drag that in right there the level right over my template and I'll drag that all the way out today whoa into the video whoa that was too far check that you don't see any template at the end when it stops or at the beginning when it starts nope so now our template is gone and we just have a black background so when people come in black like so step two before you export is delete the audio track delete the audio track you do not want that in there because when you have our single clip we're gonna mute the entire choir clip during musical breaks so we don't get any background noise obviously if you have your music recording in with that you're gonna make your recording too and you don't want that so it just deletes our music recording and then we are good to export you're gonna go here to this share button on top Apple device is 4k if you're using 4k which I would recommend you can add your title and such and then click on settings here I always go with better quality and then you want to make sure your resolution is set to right here 4k and next and you'll have a final 4k video with just your singers exported alright we've done it the hard part is over now we can do the satisfying part of putting together our entire final video so let's do that alright so the first thing you want to do is drag that newly created 4k choir clip into a new project in Final Cut Pro it should automatically make the project in the right settings 4k right frame rate etc the drag it in and that will become your new timeline it will not look like mine I messed up and had to re-import stuff so yours will be right here where this grayed out video is I added another on top of mine to edit it but you won't see that so yours will be right here that's grayed out so add in your video and then add your audio track back in and resync the audio much easier this time because everybody's already synced you just got a sync the audio up with the singing so you've got your new 4k clip in you've got your audio back in honestly that's all the necessary steps now you just might want to add some extras like titles and fade-outs and such but if you just want a simple video you got it they wanted a long title kind of a note too graduate students so I had that at the beginning you may want to add tunnels as well our video intro was not long enough so I just added a new black screen right there did that the same way we did that at the black screen before then I had a my title in again if you don't know how to titles same place your title screen up here good whichever category you want and just drag the title into the timeline right there and then you edit it here on the side where you see this little text T I won't go into details about how to create titles and final cut lots of videos on that on YouTube and since we started with a black screen and ended with a black screen we don't really need to add any fade in or fade out so there's nothing fade in or fade out to can also add a title at the end we did that previously because I needed it behind everything else another thing you may want to do now is to zoom in to certain parts of the video or pan or effects like that so if we want to just zoom in to separate parts of the video all we're gonna do is crop the video so you need to find where you want your video to be zoomed in and then you want to cut your video right there so click on your video you can get command B as your blade if you want to cut and then go through and cut your clip wherever you want a different section to come up I cut it into four parts so I could zoom in to the four different quadrants of the video so now I've got four cut Clips here so now I just click on the section and you want to zoom in on or crop then we'll go down here that little arrow next to the transformer crop symbol and we'll go to crop and you'll see our crop come in you can use the sliders on the side like we did before or you can just drag I'm just going to drag so I want it to crop on these four people here so I just set it to crop done and then we need to transform so we can bring it out to full screen again done and now we have part of our video zoomed in so you'll see a jump you could also add a crossfade if you like I actually liked how they look just jumping at this point but you can add a crossfade here you can see me jumping from different points etc so I jumped around to close-ups of each quadrant of the video quadrant that sounds Star Trek II so I really like how those jump rounds look you can also pan around the video using it final cuts built in Ken Burns effect it's it's a little corny not gonna lie it's a little corny but I mean virtual choir videos are kind of bit corny by Nature anyway so you can also do this effect with keyframes and make it more precise but that takes a lot more time I'm just gonna show you how to do it the easy way with the Ken Burns effect so we're gonna do the same thing we did before we're gonna cut our video however we want to zoom and fade and all that stuff so here I've cut where I want to pan across and then you're gonna go to crop like you did before but this time at the bottom you're gonna select Ken Burns Ken Burns right here and then you'll see two boxes you'll see this green box and you'll see the red box the green box is where your video starts the red box is where the video will end so position those however you want to green section around where you start right where you end you really drag anywhere it's anywhere I had mine just pan from one side to the other you can see that here [Music] so that can add a little interest to your final video also one of the reasons we needed to create a single video clip of all the people to do this because you couldn't have done this with all those 20 video clips we needed a single video clip to be able to zoom in and out and cut to different points we also had people holding signs here as you can see I'm going to assume you probably have that if you do you simply drag the images in add a black background behind a cropping to whatever size you want then the final thing I did is I did do some color correction and sharpening on the final video most of these people shot with iPhones and for some reason iPhones love to be orange so I did cool down the video a bit brought up the light level a bit because it was a bit dark and added some sharpening I would recommend adding some sharpening especially if it's a 4k video not a lot just a little bit and maybe doing a little cool down cuz most cameras shoot pretty warm again I just used a built-in color board you can see here on my main video and then added sharpening that's found in the same place you found those audio effects you get a video effects blur and then sharpen I know sharpens and blur I guess because it's the opposite a blur I don't know so check your video see if it's exactly how you want it and then you're done 27 hours later you're done export it you got your virtual choir video whoo we did it I told you'd be long and you'd be hard but to be honest I'm not sure there's any easy way to put together 20 people singing a song in video form but I think it looks awesome I think it sounds great and these are untrained singers these are teachers no offense sensual teachers but I mean of them sent me other videos and we're like could you please just mute mine I'm down one I don't want to say I don't like how I sound but they sound great they all sound great you put 20 people together in a choir and it covers a lot of flaws I'm not saying you guys had a lot of flaws nobody said that nobody said you have flawed is your perfect perfect teachers so there's a long process you gotta do a lot of things over and over again honestly once you get the hang of it it's actually not too difficult just takes a while if you have any questions or if you have any better ways to do this which I'm sure there are please leave them in the comments below everybody making virtual choir videos would love to know your tips and tricks on how to get it done easier I do hope this was helpful for you but was please subscribe to my new studio to see more videos like this and I'd like to leave you now with the full virtual choir video we just created enjoy [Music] [Music] my friend [Music] maybe [Music] [Music] you [Music] [Music] [Music] you you

Channel: Mina Studio

Views: 47,836

Keywords: mina, studio, worship, tech, gear, small, church, virtual choir, virtual worship, final cut pro x, final cut pro x tutorial, music video, online worship, worship team, worship band

Id: TLa4U5DWxOE

Length: 33min 27sec (2007 seconds)

Published: Thu May 28 2020