Incorporating Music into Your Videos and Films

Music and all audio components for that matter, are debatably as important as the video component of your film. Music helps set the tone and in fact can often set the tone better than your visual images. When your visuals are combined with sound effects and music, you’ll have your film´s overall tone.

As you’ve noticed, when you’re working in your NLE system you’re already starting to work with various layers. In this blog post, we’re now going to discuss the interaction between your video and audio layers.

Before we start discussing the process of securing music rights, we’ll start by talking about the technical aspects of sound and music synchronization.

Music synchronization

In order to create professional and flowing sound you will need to sync your music with your video. In order to do this you’ll need to identify certain elements within your video and certain elements within your sound. These elements may include:

Sound Elements: Tempo, beats, change in instrument, change in tempo, silent periods and specific sounds within the song.

Video Elements: Invisible cuts, jump cuts, cutaways, change in scenes, change in emotion or body language.

In the example below, notice that the mark labeled #1 is an UP-beat, the mark labeled #2 is a DOWN beat, and the mark labeled #3 is a quieter beat after a long silence in the song. All of these marks act as good edit points for your video.

These are just a few of things you could be looking out for in your video. Editing on the up and down beats helps create an obvious correlation between the sound of the music and the look of the film.

The downbeats and upbeats are easily recognizable on your audio waves when you analyze your sound recording. You’ll notice your audio waves move up and down throughout the duration of a song. As a filmmaker you’ll want to be aware of these sound variations because they provide creative opportunities for you to edit your footage.

The good news is that most video editing software programs have applications that help you identify various beats or sounds with precision. More often than not, your editing program will be able to insert small markers, helping you find the exact areas where you might consider putting cuts.

You can identify these sound variances by measuring their decibel difference and how they are spaced. For example you may want to find areas in a song which are 3 dB higher than the rest of your track. If you have a very fast-paced song with lots of sound variation, you may not want to detect every beat change, therefore you can choose to add markers to areas that are a certain distance from one another. For instance, you could ask the program to find beats which are 3 dB higher than average and are spaced no closer than 4 seconds apart from one another.

At this point you’ll have access to your film footage which you can choose to synch up with these beat changes. Obviously the point isn’t to try to change the shot on each beat but they do allow for good edit points. For instance, your music might have a nice beat to cut on every two seconds but you may not want to change your image every two seconds. That’s fine, maybe in 8 seconds or 30 seconds you could edit on one of those beats.

On the following page, we have provided an example of the “beat detector” window from Adobe Premier Elements. Below this image is an example of results from running the beat detector. You’ll notice a bunch of “markers” at the top of the timeline indicating where the beats are. This will help you accurately determine where to cut your video to synch up with your audio. Alternatively, you can use the “insert marker” button and insert markers manually at the points where you would like to edit.

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