This lecture is about how to fit a music track to your existing video. As a musician, I normally start my edits with music and fit the edit the music, but I realized not everyone does this and I think it's split about 5050 Some people just want to lay the story down or get their visuals ready, and then throw in some music. And if that's your style, then this is really important. So I'm gonna make a quick fake video edit. Say this will be the intro. And I'm not timing this out.

I haven't done this yet. So this really will be being you making this music track work to whatever is going on here. Alright, so let's say this is the intro. Maybe you You've got some sound bites or some supers that are building up the story, then this is the meat and potatoes. The main story, whether it's on screen supers or voiceover, or dialogue, interview doesn't matter. And then we'll have this be the outro.

That's like the normal basic arc of a story. And that takes about a little over a minute. So we're in the realm of normal length videos for commercials or for advertising. So let's take a look at what we can do the music track. Captain be good to me. gone on.

So when I start looking in the music track, I'm going to check out instead of listening to the whole thing through I'm using my knowledge of waveforms to check out the different sections of it and see what starts saying what sections might work. Well, for what? So I can tell you the intro this music track is a sample and it's kind of slow, but kind of groovy. Maybe we use it somewhere. All right now we'll see what happens on the waveform changes. Okay, so So to me, this seems like the meat and potatoes of the song.

So in my mind, I'm thinking, maybe this will work well for this middle section of the video. Let's see what else happens. There's a change up right here. Okay, so that's the same part so I must have missed a part. Okay, so this even though the waveform is look at the difference, the waveform this more full bodied here and there are more breaks here. So it looks like I've missed a spot.

Let's check out this right here. So this part is less full bodied. It's not the chorus I would call this the verse. This looks a little different. Let's check this out. You can kind of click through really fast Okay, here's a different part.

Interesting. I like this part, I'm gonna I'm gonna select this part right right now. It's kind of low key, it reminds me of something that might work for the intro. So cut right at the beginning of that waveform. And I'm not sure where it's ending yet. So I'm just gonna do a cut random cut there.

Select this and bring it over here. Now let's see what we have. Cool. Now when you're editing music, there's always going to be a little give and take with the visuals. So I would slide these visuals over and bring our intro out just a little more to land on the next this the end of this measure which actually wasn't even that much right here. Right so I barely had to change it and let's see what happens here.

Okay, let's say I like this part but it's on this type of section for too long. So maybe halfway through I want to bring in the big the bigger drums the chorus this part I don't know I'll just put a cut there for now, remember this is all about building the arc of the music to match the arc of the of the visuals in the story. So now we have to find a spot where this can come in nicely with this See right on this downbeat is worth a try. So that kind of works. It's hard to tell if you if we're on the right part of the measure because like we're before this is this breakdown. And so here's the, here's a technique I like to use a lot.

I'll bring this down to another track another layer. And I'll place my cursor my playhead here to remember this is where I'm looking to do the transition. And then bring, drag this track out and see if things line up. And for the most part they do, it looks like this one is one frame early, so use alt period to nudge it's the right one. And then if I played them together, they wanna once you get the hang of this, you'll start to notice some intricacies of the song. Now, if I were to cut just like this, it would be fine and the viewer wouldn't really ever notice the cut.

But it seems like I'm a little bit off, even though it's lining up. So what if those here let's try this. Now I'm using another shortcut called an that Where you can drag the transition point. I hope I'm not going too fast. But what I'm trying to accomplish here is this is kind of an awkward cut. Because in this part of the song, if it were to continue, it's continuing on with the verse and the melodies that were going on in the verse.

But I'm trying to put the chorus right here. And so this transition isn't working for me. So what I'm wanting to do is start moving this cut point around to see if there's a more natural place to cut it, where it will cause call less attention to itself. And when you're doing music editing, normally you want it to be pretty invisible. Just like real editing and movies. The editing shouldn't really call attention itself, it's just a fade in the background.

So I just drag this all the way over here because I remember the core it's before the courts, there is some sort of breakdown. So let's listen to what this sounds like. Cool. Now, if you hear the pop of this kind of that's common, and let's hit Command Shift D Ctrl Shift D to get just tiny crossfade All right, so it's cool. It's starting to get a little repetitive here. And especially as we're going through the outro, let's see if there's anything we can do to spice it up.

And so again, you want to just go and look through the track and find any cool parts. Great guitar solo. And the reason I know where all this cool stuff is in the track, and I can pick the spots is because I actually made this music. But normally when I download the stock music, the waveforms will be even more indicative and mess and there'll be bigger peaks and bigger valleys and they're more predictable and where they bring in and stuff And all that stuff. So you'll be able to apply these techniques I'm using to any music you get. Cool.

So the guitar solo starts right here. Cut on the downbeat. And take this section to our edit and hitting the minus key to zoom out while I'm holding this and dropping it there. Now to make sure I line that up correctly, I'll bring this down to layer, drag this out and zoom in real closely. Let's say I accidentally dragged it over here. Say I accidentally put it here.

You can hear that's not right. So you can do is go like this, drag that out and then line this up. because music is repetitive and it keeps the same tempo, you should always be able to line up at least some resemblance of the waveform even if the two don't look exactly right. Exactly the same. Look for the peaks the transients and align those up. And if you do that, you should be good.

So we boosted up this section with a guitar solo. I would probably adjust my visuals too. Start this next section or at least have an impactful thought right when that week guitar comes in. You see how when we change the music just even a little bit and cut with the visuals right there and we're not changing our visuals much I just changed I adjusted by a few frames. Just watch this and we're looking at plain colors, it just feels a little different. Let's listen to this to the end and come up with a good ending.

There are a couple options for endings and the easiest is making a cut and applying your crossfade calling of the day And that works, that's fine. But there's a cooler way to do evenings that can make your video a little more professional, especially if you're doing any type of commercial work videos that might go on TV, anything that's going online if you want it to feel like one cohesive piece, and like you meant to do this and then I like to grab the ending of the song and most song endings will have some kind of final hit, especially in stock music. So let's listen to the end of the song. So I want to use that final hit on the final part of the video. So let's zoom in. Cut at the beginning of that hit, you can tell us the hit because the biggest part of it's the biggest waveform on there.

So cut right at the beginning And I'm going to trim this. And now we have to see where this hip can be placed to be in time with the music that's already there. More listen. I think it would go instead of starting a new measure here, I think that's where it would go. And it's fine to take a couple tries on this, not to get it perfect the first time. That's pretty good.

Now what You have the N point set, hit N. and drag this cut point to see what might happen over here because in music, when bands and musicians are building up to the final note of a song, there's usually some kind of drum fill some kind of excitement builder that leads to the final hit. So, in my work, I like to use that, exploit it almost and put it in instead of make make the cut point over here. So start by getting the final note musically set, and then drag the cut points to the left and see what happens. I like that much better than this. There's the pop Cut crossfade and I'm still not sure I got it exactly on so I'm going to do my trick here. zoom all the way in and yes, it's on.

It's just good chat. And if this was a hard stop on our video, we would go here and I would use an exponential fade in this case to make sure the music fades all the way out. So effects exponential. Drag that on. There you go. And here's our entire edited video.

I'm not gonna make you watch the whole thing, but Look at what we did. For the intro of the video, we picked a slower section. For the middle part of the video, we had it built up a little, but then we also had it changed to the bigger section, so it didn't get too boring. And when we got to the out when we got to the final act of the video, we put in some of the guitar solo and then made a cool editing. And actually I will let this play all the way through and if you don't want to see it, you can just skip to the next lecture.