This lecture is about matching your edits to the music. This is my preferred method for editing. I like doing the audio cut before the visual. And I know that's because of my background as a musician. But I think it's really helpful to concentrate on the story you're telling, before getting into all the whole world of visuals and the possibilities with them. Because when you start with visuals, you start saying, Oh, well, I need to color grade this clip.

And you start messing with curves while you should still be editing and you start messing with speed of stabilizing, and all these things that are that are fun, cool and deserve their own time and space. But what happens if you are doing that all at once with trying to create your story, you get distracted. So if you're editing in any interview, and you are worrying about color, you're distracted from the interview itself. So I like turning all the visuals off and creating my story, putting in the music to embellish the story. And then once I'm set, then match all the B roll or whatever visuals I have to the existing music and dialog. In this case, we're just going to look at some tips on cutting to the beat.

Because once you have your music in there already, you really just want your visuals to flow nicely. Recently, I got hired to create edit templates for somebody. And he gave me a certain set of songs. I showed him where I would cut based on the music track with no knowledge of what the footage was because he hadn't selected the footage yet. And so I thought that'd be a cool thing to go over with you guys as well. So I've created Different colors here.

And each one, every time you see a new color, that would be a new piece of footage. And obviously, depending on the footage you have, if it's if it takes a long time for the shot to serve its purpose or it's a really cool shot and you want to hang on it longer. Of course you have to make those decisions based on what you have. But this is meant just as a guide for where I feel edits work really well based on the music, and how the music can dictate the flow and the rhythm of the edit and how they can work together cohesively. So let's take a listen to this first track. So let's do some quick edits.

Timewise to see what might work well. And again, I don't even need this yet. If we're just working on cuts, we can go by the way for him. And there have been many times where I've been editing like this full screen without seeing visuals. And my cinematographer will come over and say, Hey, you don't even need to see the visuals. Hmm, it would just kind of rip me.

But it works and there's a method to it. So without getting distracted by anything else, and just looking at the waveform, I see a chord right there or know a beat. So I'm gonna move my next piece of footage over. And I see another one right here. And it's all mines up right there. And obviously this is not exactly how you would do an edit you would like you would look at the footage you have and decide which goes first and the order and the Select and with what piece of footage that you have that could go this quickly in which ones you want to sit on longer.

But to show you just the rhythm and this is actually what goes on in my head when I'm putting footage onto a music track. I'm really simply just lining up waveforms lining up the footage of the waveform. So let's see what we have so far. Cool. So it works. And I'm I missed the cool opportunity here.

Record a put there. And with things like this, I guess this is a piece of footage where I could speed ramp it. Like I might, if I had a slow mo piece of footage like 60 frames per second or slower maybe a surfer, I would. here's just another cool thing you can. This is less audio editing now but it's all driven from the music, I would make the cut at the downbeat. And this from here.

From here, it would start playing slow motion. And I would hit r for the rate tool, the speed tool and speed this up. Unfortunately, it's not real footage so you're not able to get the effect. But right here, it'd be super fast and then slow. So imagine a surfer and he's Going down the wave and it's really fast and then the wave crashes and it's slow right there, and we get into slow motion. And then I would continue on.

And there would be cool little moments like there's the high hats did something interesting right here. high hats are those, like the little hits on the drum symbol that kind of keep the rhythm normally in music. It's like a little pop like a little triplet. There, I might take one clip. Let's say it's a skateboarding clip. Surfing so to use that example I would make a cut And then hit why to slip the clip.

So if he's skating, then we this essentially does a jump cut because it gets further in the cut. And then another one here, another one here. And maybe another inch. Maybe one more here, and you're not able to see it. But now we have like a jump cut series on these high hats. Imagine like a stop motion almost because it's so quick and you.

There's so many cool opportunities that you could do here. If it's a skateboarder who falls, you could do jump, and then like, mid fall, landing, crash, and then land on the smiling face of him laughing right? So it's like this whole mini sequence that is all of a sudden just created by a series of high hats. And that's what I mean about editing the music really let the music dictate how you can tell your story. Check out the song. So this has a totally different feel.

And just naturally, I want to go slower, the song slower. I may even hang on if I have compelling footage for maybe some text. I might even hang on that long and wait till here. Then on the downbeat again, so you can get the theme of it. I really emphasize using the waveform to dictate where your cuts go. Little bit off as a cool moment.

So on this on this little hit here and probably cut right there. You can even cut the back and then there's like a sounds like a cello going back and forth really quickly. So you could bust out your speedy editing chops and make your waveform bigger see as a guy that can help you. So it looks like it starts right here. It looks like that's the length we're going to go for. So as a guy that might copy that and disable it disabled and these as the time guide some more of these Got some got some trucks in the background.

Sorry about that. Let me hear, I might be a little off we might need to just be here. Let that ride again. Now when doing a series like this, the most important thing is they get it right on this big downbeat so I don't have it quite right. Which means all these are the probably a little bit off but if I were just to bring this here, check out what it does for the rest of them. Doesn't really matter too much.

You get the effect of going Really fast and landing on something slow. So, to sum it all up, use the waveform to your advantage. Start with the music, get your story right, and then bring the visuals in to match the music and let the music guide you shape how the Edit flows.