How to Cut to the Beat of Music in Premiere Pro CC

all right my name is Jason Levine very nice to see you and have you joined me so what we're going to talk about today is cutting cutting video to the beat of music and this is something which is done all the time but more importantly it can be automated in Premiere Pro it's a really simple process and something that you know again is very common and really is sort of a great way to get started if you're if you're sort of cutting I almost said montage montage cutting montage is there any kind of just sort of b-roll backing that you know you sort of want you know maybe you'll have some voiceover I did this recently for this little documentary I was cutting where I just had kind of these scenes going against this music and it's it's just nice when you transition on the beat whether you use dissolves or any other sort of you know light leak technique to transition the video itself that's entirely up to you but there is something very aesthetically pleasing when the video kind of follows you know the downbeat of music whether it's super fast or slow or whatever so let's go ahead and switch my screen here and what I have here are a whole series of shots for those of you who weren't with me yesterday that I did in San Francisco a couple months ago I even have some Adobe stock content to kind of round out the footage that I shot I might set some in and out points just kind of the regions of interest really that I want and you'll see why I'm doing that in just a moment I don't know how long this is necessarily going to be but we'll kind of do a couple seconds on each of these this is actually one of the shots I think that we used yesterday it's a nice fog slow-moving fog here and again we're looking at this a quarter res if anyone's wondering why it looks a little pixelated okay so we've got our quarter as fractional playback while it's happening here on my on my laptop so I'm gonna set a couple in and outs on some of these things again here's another there's another time-lapse classic classic Golden Gate shot that anyone who's come to San Francisco and shoots the Golden Gate you can stand in this exact position and get this same piece of content right here which is kind of nice a couple stylistic shots here which are kind of neat or at least I thought they were name this one might not be moving quite as much very slow moving that's alright it's kind of cool super shallow depth-of-field these particular ones here I think these are mostly iPhone alright so we're gonna start with just audio and our timeline here alright and I'll let you quickly listen to this this is a ballot actually this particular piece is something that I composed and recorded for our collection of loop ology files loop ology over 5000 royalty-free pieces of content and more than 35 different styles played on dozens and dozens of different instruments and this is some of the pre created timed music beds that I built for you this is one that's just in the general category and it's kind of a ballad style so take a quick listen to this it's kind of nice and slow and dreamy [Music] you kind of see where the shots so you get the idea so how do we start the process well here's the thing it is in fact an automated process in fact the button is called automate to sequence that's what I'll show you in just a moment it's been there forever however you still manually have to put in markers on the beat now I of course can't if you can't feel the beat you know that's kind of on you so it takes practice right and also of course there is that time delay of actually hitting the key in this case shortcut key M you can also just click on this add marker button right here as it's playing back to add those markers and you can kind of fine tune them in advance it's also with audio files in particular now it gets harder and harder with more and more modern mixes because you've ever looked at the audio waveforms oftentimes when you look at them even premiere unless you're really zoomed in it kind of just looks like a like a solid rectangle you can't even see Peaks and attacks anymore but this file because it's fairly sparse you can actually see Peaks right you can actually see where there's like the beat of the kick drum or the snare drum so that's going to give you again another sort of visual indication of where or how close you are to the beat in case you know your timing is a little off right and admittedly based on you know the buffer settings of your sound device you know if you're using an internal sound card or an external sound card there is some delay introduced here so you may have to slip and slide those markers just a tad but in any case let's start playing back and I'm going to lay down some markers and typically I'll lay down one right at the beginning before I do anything and you'll see why in just a moment let's go ahead and play this back [Music] see it'll stop [Music] [Music] I don't even think I have that much content okay so now when you look down below again you can see here in our timeline that we have all of these green markers and as I was saying before if I just kind of shrink this up a little bit and if I use my again I'm just gesturing here on the mouse to expand the vertical height of my track this is again one of those sort of little hidden features that people don't realize you can also of course you know you can use these little portion bars thingies on the right side I don't even know what we call these anymore I don't know you can just gesture or you can actually just physically grab the track divider and resize it but it's so nice and easy with a wheel or adjust your mouse but as I was saying you know if we zoom in here and we look at sort of where the markers are right you can physically see that I'm right there ah right kick-drum marker alright and you know it's it's really because we're dealing in frames per second as opposed to samples per second look at that it's kind of like right in the middle of the attack transient so you know sometimes you can actually move it back a frame if you feel like it's not you know it's not quite right to be honest I think this is going to be good enough for what we need to do it's certainly on the beat in terms of real time it's just the question of do you want the video to appear a little sooner and sometimes that one frame difference actually can make it look a little better in which case you could just click and drag and slip that marker to where your playhead is and it just snaps right there as you just saw okay so we'll just leave that one like that okay so now that we've got our markers in here let's now select our content that we want to automate to that sequence at those cut points inside the project panel all right so I'm going to first of all take off this preview area and very quickly I'm just going to make this full screen so I can select all of my clips and of course you know we can scale this up as well and you've got your hover scrub capabilities here this also makes it easy to see that I've already set some in and out points right so I can select this one select this one this is a very long clip so maybe I'll come in here and I'll do a little in and out on this as well a couple seconds so let's do this this this this this one here and we'll go to this one here and this one and this one okay I select all the clips that I want alright whether or not I have more markers than I have clips that's fine it just won't place a clip at that marker okay so now the key thing is we're going to go into this button this function here which actually has a little tool tip called automate to sequence so let's go ahead and choose that and remember we've selected all of our Clips we've already dropped in all of our markers and now we can choose first and foremost the sort order so do we want how it's sorted or how we selected it I want the selection order how I actually clicked and placed and organized these things don't forget that when you have this view the icon viewing premieres project panel you can actually physically pick up and reposition clips in a sequential order and that can be the sorting order all right so you can actually move this around Allah sort of storyboard like to put things in order before you even come into this dialog and I can show you that again after we do this just so you can see placement sequentially are at unnumbered markers we're gonna place it at on numbered markers we're going to do an overwrite edit for the method here for still clips we can use in out ranges frames per still so you can again use this in combination with still imagery that you have there's also some defaults for how long you know a typical still image comes into a sequence if needed you can see here transitions can be applied and you can ignore audio ignore video we're not going to do that for now selection order add a numbered markers overwrite edit in an out range let's click OK let's go back out so we're no longer in full screen and there we go just like that it's done and if we take a look down here you can see by the way here's why I added that marker at the very beginning at zero of the timeline because you know by the time you hit play that first marker wouldn't be a desert so I just always drop one in before I even start you can also just drop on in and drag it after the fact it doesn't matter but that way you get video at the first frame and that first frame of course will probably do something like a you know a little quick fade up so just to again just real quickly I'm gonna do that because I would this is something I would do anyway kind of a nice long fade and then maybe we want to do you know transitions across these cross dissolves or whatever for this kind of slow slow music I might like something like that maybe in the faster section there will let it kind of actual just straight cuts I know cross dissolves not ideal most people hate them I'm just trying to show you but you can see that all of our cuts now happen at the markers exactly where we placed them really simple really easy so now when I play this back oh and did I have look at that I have a piece of footage there that is not that is not the right frame so let me just scrub through make sure everything else is is yes yes yes okay and here since someone was asking before ah here we go so it's under media preferences default media scaling so right now I have none if you want it to automatically scale to the frame size of your sequence use that if you want to set it to the frame size these are two different things again we have videos to discuss the differences there here's where you enable that option okay wasted time gone let's go and play this back and check out my automate to sequence here we go Oh what what just happened here Oh cuz I cut into my music oh because there was audio on some of those Oh duh that was dumb ok my bad yo okay no problem let me just go ahead and read rag the music back down in there that was my that was my user error that was pretty dumb got really kind of stole my Thunder right there okay here we go see in the across the song just kind of works there and we're at 1/8 okay all right so very simply it very easily we cut everything right on the beat does it stretch the clip rate Joshua no so it does not so so this is a fundamental thing about this and that's why it's asking for the type of edit that you're performing insert or overwrite but no it doesn't actually do any stretching of the content now if you had a piece of video where you had it that was too short you'll have black space right it'll just it'll play as much as it is and then it'll go to black so the technique there if that were the case now for these clips they were all fairly long we didn't have that problem but what you could then do let me just let me just pretend here that this piece is shorter okay so you'd have this kind of gap right here if you right click on the effects badge down here or control-click you could do a time remap of course and you know whoops not that and actually slow slow the clip down right to kind of fit the duration so that's something that you could do in the event that your media is too sure but it doesn't actually do a stretch it's a great question okay now that's kind of just doing it with very slow music but again you can have it super fast paced I don't need to really show this again but the concept would be and if we take out our audio target on track one here okay same thing I could set my marker before I begin okay so here I did much more much more rapid-fire marking if I take the same same clips up here let's do the same thing again alright this might be too many clips now selection order add a numbered markers overwrite we can ignore the audio even though I've I've moved it here but let's go ahead and click OK alright back out and there we go and once again everything is beautifully in place alright and because we ignore the audio it didn't insert any of the audio that on the clips that had it we're good to go here so let's go ahead and play this back now no transitions okay and this is another this is from my ambient rock corporate collection inside of apologies music beds and that's it friends that's all to make the sequence it's that easy now like I said you can also manually go in and move those markers about here's another example right again this music was mastered but it wasn't mastered you know to to kill the listener so there's actual Peaks in here so that you can really see you know again it takes a while to kind of get the timing just the timing it's it's not unlike doing anything with an external controller there is obviously a little bit of a little bit of latency not much we're talking milliseconds here but again depending upon your soundcard depending upon what you've got going on if you're working in 4k I'd recommend doing this kind of cutting you know at a lower fractional playback just for better real-time performance um all of those factors come into play so if you find that like your markers are every time they're like three to six frames off you might need to readjust buffer settings or perhaps try dropping the fractional playback resolution in the program monitor also if you have it available to you it never hurts to go into your project settings and again choose one of the various levels of GPU acceleration which again just kind of takes some of the headache of playing certain things file formats and if you've got grading or anything on footage or whatever if you've got like master clip effects kind of takes the edge off there frees up the CPU to give you just more real time when dropping in those markers and again if you're on the Mac you know you'll have OpenCL metal software and possibly CUDA if you've got any supported nvidia cuda cards and then of course you can also you know use the cuda on Windows as well have a great weekend everybody I will see you again thanks for watching take care bye bye

Channel: Jason Levine

Views: 63,660

Keywords: edit, cut, beat, music, premiere pro, sequence, beatlejase, jason levine, editing, cutting, audio, sync, markers

Id: mPRO-Q7jHVI

Length: 16min 37sec (997 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 22 2017