How to Edit a Music Video

April 01, 2012

edit, editing, editing a music video, editor, fcp, final cut pro, how to, music video, pluraleyes, premiere pro, singular software, sync, syncing

16 Comments

How to Edit a Music Video

So you want to learn how to edit a music video? It’s fun and rewarding but also very tedious. This post explains the process of editing music video footage shot of the band “performing” their song. In most music videos the band plays along and lip-syncs to the song in order to artistically reproduce the effect of a live performance. In this article I call that section of the music video the “live performance“ and I’m going to explain the best and most effective method for editing that.

This article will be helpful to both to beginners and intermediate editors. My goal is to explain in detail how to edit a music video the easiest and most efficient way. The more knowledge you have the less barriers there are between your creativity and the final video. The footage I’ll be using for examples is from a music video shot in charlotte nc of the band Steel Standing. The footage was shot for a contest I held for my Video Editor’s Group on linkedin. It was sponsored by Red Giant, Noise Industries and Videoguys. (Also Singular Software, the makers of PluralEyes but the company was bought by Red Giant during the contest)

You can see all the contest submissions here. If you want a copy of the footage to practice with, contact us. If you’re trying to gain experience we’ll probably let you use it in your portfolio as well.

The winning music video, shot in Charlotte NC.

(Unrelated Note: Here’s a really cool music video I found recently that is shot entirely in slow motion. It’s incredibly well made.)

Overview

There are 2 standard segments that make up 99% of all music videos

Band performance
Storyline

Storylines are abstract and open for interpretation so there’s no real science behind it, this article will focus on the best way to shoot and edit the band performance segment so you’ll know how to edit a music video of any type.

Innovative music video that is all 1st person storyline.

The band performance segment of a music video consists of the band playing along in time to the recorded track. While shooting, you play the recorded track through loud speakers and film the band playing along to the track. You shoot it from various different angles. I suggest getting as many different angles as possible to give the editor as much material to work with as possible.

In the past the editor would then take all the angles that you shot and manually sync up the shots to the recorded track by ear. This is an extremely tedious but necessary process until recently…

One of my favorite music videos

Rise of DSLR’s (It’s relevant I promise)

The rise of DSLR’s changed the indie film/video making community forever. No longer will it cost upwards of $25,000 to achieve film like shallow depth of field. However currently DSLR’s are limited by their crappy (no better way to put it) audio recording capabilities. Due to the terrible on-board mic and auto-gain control (agc) people started recording audio separately with recorders like the zoom h4n or tascam, then syncing the audio in the edit. This was also a terrible and time consuming process until one company created a plugin that solved the issue.

Pluraleyes

Singular Software released a plugin called PluralEyes. What PluralEyes does is automatically sync separately recorded video and audio tracks. Your DSLR will be filming high-quality video with the embedded low-quality audio from the on-board mic, you’ll simultaneously be recording your high quality audio on a separate recorder like the zoom. What PluralEyes does is match up the waveform from the low quality embedded audio to the high quality separate zoom audio. Since the low quality DSLR audio is automatically synced to the video, when PluralEyes matched the different audio tracks, boom badda bing, your high quality video is synced to your high quality audio.

Now back to the topic of editing a music video. Once you bring all that footage into post (remember you were playing the recorded track through the speakers so the band could play along, well your camera picked that up) PluralEyes syncs the video to the recorded audio by matching the waveforms from your on-board mic to your recorded audio track.

New Workflow

*Update 2/12/2013

The company that bought PluralEyes, Red Giant, has released a brand spanking new version that kicks butt and makes the part of the process within these graphics not necessary. However, currently the updated version is only for mac, pc users still have the same version, and this information still applies. Don’t worry, I’m sure Red Giant will get it out for pc soon, they better it’s been a while.

Short video tutorial for how to use the new version of PluralEyes for Mac, which really is awesome by the way.

*Update: The following process of syncing each clip to the studio track, one by one, is not necessary. On a blank timeline drop in the studio audio into track one. Then drop in your video clips one on top of another, each clip with it’s own video and audio track. The most important thing is that each clip is on it’s own track, stacked on top of eachother vertically. I’ve done this many times since I wrote this post and it definitely works. However I’m on a PC now, I switched to premiere pro and the new Pluraleyes still isn’t available for windows so if you’re on a pc like me we still have to use the old version which is not nearly as stable. Depending on how many tracks your stacking you could have issues. I definitely recommend trying to sync them all at once first. You shouldn’t have an issue but if you do then try syncing just a few at a time, that should work. When syncing audio you may have to go in and manually sync one or two tracks if you didn’t get decent audio with your on-board but for the most part it should sync fine.

*If syncing multiple clips at once works for you then skip down to the “Old Process Ends Here” graphic.

This will end up saving you a ton of time (relative to when we did it manually), but it might change the way you would normally edit. Pluraleyes syncs the audio in the timeline. You take angle 1, drop it on top of the recorded audio and hit sync.

Pluraleyes then outputs a new sequence with the video and audio synced. So you end up with the synced track in the timeline instead of the source monitor where you would normally trim the clip to insert into the sequence. You then need to go back to the original sequence, replace angle 1 with angle 2 and hit sync. Pluraleyes will output another synced sequence. You do that for every shot you have, and you end up with a synced sequence for every video clip.

how to edit a music video pluraleyes synced timeline

Now here’s the best way to edit all these synced tracks. Make sure the synced video/audio track is at the very beginning of every sequence.

Depending on what part of the song you began recording, some clips will start at the beginning of the song (if the video clip extends past the audio, trim it down to match the song) and some video clips won’t begin til later in the song. Move the video clip on your 2nd synced sequence up to track 2, then move the video clip on your 3rd synced sequence up to track 3, repeat this on down the line for every synced sequence so that each video clip resides on it’s own video track.

Now create 1 main sequence, drag a random clip in to get the correct sequence settings(if you’re using final cut pro) and you can just copy and paste the video clip from each sequence into the 1 main sequence where you’ll do your edit.

how edit music video sequence settings pluraleyes

*Note: To copy and paste the video correctly from the synced sequnces into the main, you need to select both the video and audio, copy then go to the main sequence, and make sure to move your playhead to the very beginning of the sequence and hit paste every time, otherwise it will paste wherever your playhead is. It will just keep replacing your audio which is perfectly fine.

Ok so you have a sequence with the recorded audio track and all your video clips lined up in time with the song. Editing from this may be confusing if you’ve never done it before. It’s similar to the way you would edit multicam (except all the angles were recorded by one camera instead of 10 so you will have continuity issues, but jump cuts work in a lot of music videos so it’s not a major concern).

how to edit music video sequence final cut pro pluraleyes

Editing Process

I’ve found that the most effective way is to play the song from the beginning. If you don’t like the first angle then trim that down and see how it looks with the 2nd angle, and so on until you find the opening shot you like.

Play the song until you feel an edit. I learned the method of feeling edits from Walter Murch‘s book “In the Blink of an Eye” He teaches to play the clip until you feel an edit and hit pause when you do. Keep doing that until you pause on the same exact frame 3 times in a row. I’m not usually that strict about it, I’ll usually do it until I hit the same frame twice or I’ll split the difference if it’s close and play it a couple times to feel it out. In my opinion timing is something you feel based on the music and the footage.

Music video I shot and edited. Very fast paced editing style on this. The band performance is about 2/3 through.

So you have the opening shot and you know where the first cut needs to be. Take your blade tool and make a cut at the first edit. Right at the edit point go straight up and down and make a cut on every clip above and below your edit. Then trim back all the tracks after the first edit point except the very bottom clip. Play through the edit. If you don’t like the shot it cuts to, pull the next shot in, play it again. Repeat this til you find the shot you do want to cut to.

By now you should be getting a feel for the process, unless you’re extremely familiar with your footage, it’s going to be a trial and error process, however it’s a great way to cut a video with great pacing. It’s a combination of feeling the edit based on the music, combined with trying each available option.

Pluraleyes is available for most non-linear editing platforms…final cut pro, fcpx, premiere pro, sony vegas, avid media composer and grass valley edius. (Final cut pro x has a built in way to do this but it isn’t nearly as good) Singular Software offers a 30 day full trial for every platform so try it out. This is one plugin that is easily worth the time it saves you. Here’s a link where you can download their trial plugins. Trial

*Note: I do not work for Singular Software, it’s just an essential product.

*Note: If you’re editing in final cut, I strongly recommend editing with a wav instead of mp3, mp3′s are very glitchy in final cut pro. (You can easily convert an mp3 to wav by adding the track to your itunes library, change the import settings to wav encoder then right click the song and select “create wav version”

*Note: Let me know what I left out in the comments. Or post a music video you edited and I’ll add it in, or just your favorite music video.