How to Sync Video | Cubase | Composer Behind The Scenes

hello everyone welcome back to the channel today we're going to talk about how to import video clips within cubase and set up your film scoring project quickly so you can begin to write music right away let's take a look okay so you've just got that director's brief and you've been given a video clip from the production company or maybe you've got that vlog clip wedding footage corporate video whatever it is and you need to load that up and do some composing and scoring too well how do you do that as quickly as possible and make sure you don't set yourself up for failure and use cubase the way it was designed for i've got cubase 11 pro and a demo film clip i slapped together from some stock footage let's practice shall we okay let's jump right into this so let's get into cubase here now let me make sure our screens are all visible okay so here we go we have a project that's opened up it's pretty default i believe so what i'm going to do is first import our video file that we might have so i've got a clip here called demo action queue and i've got it at 720p now this is something that's pretty important if you're going to be scoring to a video and you're going to be looping through it over and over again and you want something that's going to be easy for your computer to handle so what you need to do and this is something that you should always do and make sure that you get correct is in project setup here you want to make sure that you get the frame rate from the video or if you know what the frame rate is from the video you can punch it in in the drop down list here there you go so that message is gone we we no longer have that warning and also by clicking on that get frame rate you know we're pulling it right from that video okay so the next thing you want to do is launch the little preview window here or the video window and you can see here that you can also change the size of it so i usually have it somewhere around that size or maybe something even smaller sometimes it gets in the way when you're trying to write your your score here so if i just hit spacebar it starts playing looks pretty smooth okay that's great so we got that going now you'll notice that there's something that's pretty fundamental here that's missing is the time code so if you get a video that doesn't have a burnt in time code right on the image itself you can go ahead and go to studio setup and say show time code under video player so again that was studio studio setup under video player show time code and then you can pick where you want on the screen it's going to superimpose itself on so i'm just going to stay in the center there you go so now that's something that's very important you can see how many seconds and how many frame which frame you're at so remember this far right in simpty time code is the actual frame that you're in so this is 30 frames per second right now we're looking at the 24th frame in that and if i want to move frame by frame you can just use your mouse and scrub to the right or left so i'm holding down the left mouse button and then dragging it left and right here so that's going to be important later on when we start adding the markers to this project so maybe we'll move on to that next actually just before we move on to that um right now we have it at bar one at the very beginning of the video clip and it's at zero but sometimes we want a little bit of a a couple bars offset before this just so we can have some space to maybe move some of our midi data or audio around within cubase before the flip again so what we can do is go back into the project setting or project setup here and i want to say display bar offset of let's say a couple bars and when it asks you do you want to keep the project contents everything here at its current bar position so right now it's at bar one i'm gonna say yes keep it there so it sticks to bar one even though i'm going to add a couple more bars for off there you go so we're at bar one and i'm going to move our little cur our cursor to bar one and something sometimes kind of odd happens with cubase i don't know why this happens but i can recreate it over and over again maybe someone in the comments can let me know is that it seems to when you even you put it right at bar one and you have your cursor literally let's see if i if i make sure i snap it to yeah beginning of r1 here it seems to make the time code starts at four seconds which is incorrect so what you need to do is make sure it's there at bar one and then go to project set time code at cursor and set this to zero seconds and then it says you have modified okay here's where you want to say no because you want no matter what at this point and this where this video snap to you want it at zero sec there you go so now if i look at it we're at zero seconds again and all these two bars are available to us okay so we got it to this point the next step i would do is create a marker track and call it whatever you want i'll just leave it as default there okay now one very important thing you want with a marker track when you're going to video here and syncing is go to the track control settings and make sure toggle time base is going to be available to you oh i just did that hit ok and then you'll get this little icon here toggle time base between musical and linear what that means is that when you drop a marker that marker is going to stay pinned versus against either musical which is bars and beats or against the exact time here so we want it to be sticky to the time instead of bars and beats because we want to always follow the the picture here at this point you can go ahead and play your film and if you've already got a cue sheet maybe from a director or production company you can follow off that and then start dropping all your different markers and stuff like that or if you know you're told to have free reign and go and figure out what might make sense for the scene and you come up with some scoring and hit points for your liking you can go ahead and play the film so i usually just hit spacebar wherever i think there's something interesting or i can scrub faster through where i think it probably needs some sort of change of music or tempo so i'm doing this super fast by the way you probably want to absorb it a little bit more but here i've already seen this clip several times so i'm just going to go to the beginning of where her face shows up there we go and at this point i want to drop a marker and on windows you can just hit the insert button and it'll drop it right there exactly where you are with the film and you can also click on the marker and then drag it around but right now i have it snapped to grid so we don't want that there you go you can you can drag it back and forth until you find the right moment that you want and the right frame okay looks like frame 11 there um oh yeah the other thing you need to make sure you have enabled is um there is a transport use video follows edit mode so whatever you edit in whether it's midi or audio and anything that you scrub back and forth and you're making a change the the scene and what frame it's at will move along with your edit so um just make sure that's turned on okay so yeah here we go so let's say we have a hit point that we want there we drop a marker maybe we want another mark right here when we see this base air tower or some sort we can scrub some more and maybe we'll just throw another one actually if you can do shift n to move between markers or shift b to move back and forth so maybe i'll say let's go over here i'll scrub a little bit until right when we see this plane maybe boom right there i'll drop another marker okay and then of course markers you can say um you can add descriptions here so just highlighting it clicking description so pilot intro i don't know and then this is base uh oh we're flying don't know something like that okay so that's that's all fine and dandy so you go through your whole scene here and you can start punch putting in all these markers the next step would always add is a tempo track and would add a signature track those are all pretty pretty fundamental things that you need to make sure you have one so here comes the the key thing when you're trying to sync to video is you want to use this time warp tool and you see when i click on it this changes color a little bit here so what you can do is let's say you want the pilot intro here this marker that i dropped in uh you want it right at the beginning of bar four so right at the downbeat you can hover your mouse over there until you get this little metronome looking thing and then you can slide and adjust you can see how the tempo is moving up and down yeah you can move that bar over to exactly the beginning of that marker or where that frame was so you can go drop as many of these time warp entries here as you need so let's say i want this second marker of the base i want that to start right at bar seven so i would hover my mouse over there until i get that and then i'll leave it there and drop it there like that okay and then maybe we'll do one more here let's say 11 is right when the overflying marker would be okay so that should get you up and started and then of course you would um you can go ahead and start adding a you know all your instruments or maybe this is a template already and you're just loading the video into your template that's also quite possible there okay and so let's say i'm just going to pick a patch here somehow maybe i'll get a pad so at this point let's say this is your track that you're working with i'm just going to change the color here and if you go to i'm just going to create a midi kind of selection here now if i just double clicked and opened up in this edit mode one thing i really want to share with you this really handy tip that will save you a ton of time is to click on global tracks here i think this is a fairly new feature you can highlight the tracks and that you want to see as you're in this piano roll editing mode for midi so this is super awesome where you can see the marker of exactly when let's say i want uh chord here um actually while we're at it let's just do a whole chord i don't know if you guys have ever used this chord editing tool it's pretty handy if you don't want to play things in and you just want to just slap in some chords very easily very quickly so i don't know d minor we'll do a uh so you can see how you can just follow and sync to what you marked earlier all right so i don't know just for fun let's see what this looks like now uh it's not gonna win you any grammys or uh oscars for that but i think you get the idea so that's what you can do another thing i need to share with you is for even your midi tracks if you wanted to follow along with linear or musical mode you also need to with each one go to track control settings and toggle time base and add it as well now so right now this is following the bars and b and sometimes you want it to actually follow the picture itself so um just remember that that's also available to you if you ever let's say decide to change some of these at the tempo within this segment right here so if i left it musical it didn't really follow along of what i wanted there right let me set that back to there now if i did did it to linear mode you can see how the midi notes actually follow along and just like with the marker will will be sticky to that particular frame so if i always want that chord change right at that frame that's how you can do it and then you can kind of pick and choose from there how you want to deal with your different scenes and sticking different parts of the track so maybe i'll leave it at that to get you started and play around with the time warp tool moving it around and lining up to certain hit points and also play around with the tempo and see how it starts to affect the expansion contraction of the bars and beats and and where it lines up with some of these markers okay so through the magic of youtube or tv we've gone ahead and uh done a little bit of fun scoring and quickly slapped together some things and i thought i'd share a few things for you here of how to work with this so i've adjusted around with time signatures and i changed my mind and i need to align things back up again you'll see here for example that the solo flying marker is no longer landing on a downbeat in the beginning of a bar here so i want to for example make sure that's starting at the beginning of bar eight here again sometimes i you'd need to make some adjustments here so i can put i can grab that uh oh i can grab that and then move it until the beginning of bar 8 lands right at the solo flying marker again or i could have deleted that and since i didn't like how it was lining up incorrectly there i can literally hover my mouse over bar eight click to create a time warp entry and then make that line up right to the that marker similarly over here maybe i don't like what's happening over here you can press shift to delete that time warp entry and i'm going to let's say grab the beginning of our 12 for this enemy squadron marker just to make that line up there okay since you're still here thanks for uh sticking around and i hope that was uh handy for you and we'll just uh i'll play you out with uh this cue all right i'll see you and have a great rest of the week [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Alvin S Wong Music

Views: 9,506

Keywords: Dom Sigalas, Greg Ondo, composer, composer behind the scenes, composing to video, cubase, cubase 11, cubase 11 pro, cubase global tracks, cubase how to, cubase markers, cubase pro, cubase tips, cubase tips and tricks, cubase tutorial, film composer, film scoring, learn cubase, markers in cubase, music production, orchestral programming, sample library, scoring with cubase, steinberg cubase, time warp tool, timecode in cubase, video for cubase, virtual instruments

Id: Rv12yt-h2y4

Length: 15min 47sec (947 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 17 2020