can I browse actual time-on-the-wall in a track?

[Dave K]

Hi folks,

I know this may be an odd question. But I'm trying to make a music video. Besides all the audio tracks getting recorded into Logic, I'm taking a bunch of video clips with a couple of iPhones. Sometimes they are not full length videos, just of certain sections. Later on, I'm going to have to figure out where these video clips fit into the recording. 

Is there a way to see the actual time of recording ("time on the wall") for individual tracks? Browsers > Project > Show File Info doesn't seem to have it...

Bonus points if there's a way to see the actual SECOND as I scroll through the recording. I'm going to have to do that one way or another to line up the video with the audio...

Thanks in advance!

Dave

[fuzzfilth]

First you edit all the video clips you have into one video track, with the crappy source audio from the videos. Since Logic can not edit video, you do this in a dedicated video editing app. DaVinci Resolve has a professional feature set and is free. Take good notes which one of the 45 takes of guitar solo you ended up using...

Then you bring this edited full length video clip with its scrap audio into Logic and replace the scrap audio parts with the multitrack.

Then Bounce the final mix back into the video file.

As for the actual question, video files usually are named with day and time, so you can easily spot them to actual day time in the video editor.

If you expect trouble in finding correct parts later, you may even import the full length continuous multitrack audio (MTA) files into the video editor, fine-adjust the unedited video clips so they are in perfect sync with the MTA, then link the MTA to the video clips and edit video+MTA into the final video. Then you export the edited MTA (and the rendered version of the video edit) to Logic for the final mix.

Edited February 7 by fuzzfilth

[Christopher11]

That's great info fuzzfilth!  Sounds like you sync music to picture a lot?

[JakobP]

Just had to link to this, not my style of music though... 😄 Your craftsmanship is impressive, @fuzzfilth 🙂 https://www.logicprohelp.com/forums/topic/129606-what-the-crown-makes-you-do/#comment-742181 

EDIT "One week render time" 😮 😄

Edited February 7 by JakobP

[Dave K]

4 hours ago, fuzzfilth said:

First you edit all the video clips you have into one video track, with the crappy source audio from the videos.

Thanks so m much for the reply. I'm curious why you choose this and the other approaches you suggested.

It will be almost impossible for me to line up video clips without a solid "source of truth" timeline. Why not mix the song to completion in Logic, then export the audio file to iMovie or Final Cut Pro (haven't decided yet) and try to line up the video clips over that audio reference?

The down side is that I will have lost the timestamps of the individual tracks after mixing (hence my OP). Is that why you suggested importing MTA into Final Cut? But if I do that (and include the mastered track as well), then I'll have everything I need in Final Cut to finish the video. Why do I ever need to come back to Logic at that point?

5 hours ago, fuzzfilth said:

As for the actual question, video files usually are named with day and time, so you can easily spot them to actual day time in the video editor.

Yes, but where can I find the date/time of the track audio in Logic?

[fuzzfilth]

If I may backtrack a bit, there's a couple of possible scenarios here.

1. The 'normal' music video, where the artist just fool around and lipsync to the already finalized song. Here it's obvious, at the shoot you play back the song over and over, they do their thing, director gets all the shots they want. Usually you begin shooting with a couple of continuous long shots so you later have something, anything into which you can insert your closeups and b-roll. Then you do gradually closer and closer scenes until you are 10cm away from Eddie's fingers (if he lets you, that is). So the closeness of the scene later gives a good hint when in the day it was shot. Cameras record time code, and, if possible, audio (lowres, just to make spotting easier later) 

Here you have no multitrack audio and you edit the video clips to the final master of the song.

2. Shooting an actual live performance with audience. Usually you try to shoot a couple shows with a couple of cameras each, and if you're lucky, the band wears the same stage outfit every time. Now you hopefully have enough material to combine great sections into a cohesive and interesting video. You try to keep the audio of each section so it stays in sync with the picture, but for short insert scenes you may also keep the audio from the clip you're inserting to. Depending on the tempo variation between shows, you can get quite creative here, unless you closely show the guitar solo from day 3.

Managing media here is easy since you got exactly 3 versions of everything, one from each show.

3. Shooting a music video by yourself and kinda make it up as you go. Since you're not trained in project management, you may end up with dozens and dozens of takes all over the place, and during editing you find that you have way too many of this and nothing of the other. That's normal for learning the ropes. Accept the challenge and take your time.

 

So in which category would you slot in your project ?

[Dave K]

3 hours ago, fuzzfilth said:

If I may backtrack a bit, there's a couple of possible scenarios here.

Thanks so much for your reply.  My scenario resembles portions of these, but differs. Here it is slightly simplified:

I have 5 musicians. Each one came to my studio on separate days where I took both audio and video recordings of their performance. The best audio take will be selected. Some of the video will match that actual audio; some may be from a different angle or different take and be useful as "lip-sync" or b-roll. It's all performed to a track/click, so timing will be close. And what they're wearing will not have changed.

I now have the audio mix effectively finalized in Logic. Next stop: make the video. The video should primarily feature the actual recording, so it looks and feels authentic. I'll switch back and forth between the various players/singers; maybe do picture-in-picture; not sure yet.  But I also want to splice in some of the other "lip-sync" camera angles for creative purposes.

How would you proceed here?

Thanks!

Edited February 8 by reggoboy

[fuzzfilth]

In the video editing software, you put all the video sources on separate tracks and sync them to the final stereo mix (there are features which do this automatically by evaluating the waveform). 

Then you create a so-called Multicam Clip from all these video clips, similar to Logic's Take Folder. This will give you a 4 x 4 pattern on the screen showing all 16 video sources at the same time.

Now you can click on any track and it will cut to that camera at that point, akin to working with Takes in Logic.

Once you've done that rough cut, you can manually pull that one spot where the bass player smiled because of a fluke over to the spot where nothing really interesting happened on any of the existing  tracks. 

[enossified]

You can also do it the old fashioned way, from all the way back to the dawn of sound in movies.

[Dave K]

Thanks again for the reply!

6 hours ago, fuzzfilth said:

In the video editing software, you put all the video sources on separate tracks and sync them to the final stereo mix

Yes, this has been my plan...

6 hours ago, fuzzfilth said:

(there are features which do this automatically by evaluating the waveform)

This I didn't know and would be freaking awesome! I've been dreading having to do this by hand. I got Final Cut Pro in a bundle with Logic, and haven't touched it yet. But I'm going to have to check to see if it has that feature!

6 hours ago, fuzzfilth said:

Then you create a so-called Multicam Clip from all these video clips, similar to Logic's Take Folder. This will give you a 4 x 4 pattern on the screen showing all 16 video sources at the same time.

Now you can click on any track and it will cut to that camera at that point, akin to working with Takes in Logic.

Yea, if Final Cut makes that process easy, that would be great 🤩

Thanks for the tips! And nice job with that multi-cam choir video!

[Dave K]

5 hours ago, reggoboy said:

Yea, if Final Cut makes that process easy, that would be great 🤩

Some homework suggests that Final Cut Pro will be serving me well in this regard. Looks like not only will it try to align clips based on audio waveform, it can also look at the timestamp on the video files to align them against the "time-on-the-wall" clock:

https://support.apple.com/guide/final-cut-pro/sync-audio-and-video-verc1fabc30/10.7/mac/13.5

[Dave K]

Recapping here for a "solution", it seems the original question was not answered, even though some awesome alternative partial-solutions were provided.

The "audio sync" will probably help me sync my live audio and video. Any multicam angles that can't be synced by waveform can probably be synced by Final Cut's "Content Created" sync feature, since it claims to sync video footage by timestamp. Given these two features, my need to manually inspect the timestamp on the Logic tracks may be unnecessary; but it still would be handy as a confirmation.

As for any subsequent / lip-sync takes, since they are a different session, they will not have identical audio and audio sync will probably fail. But timestamp wouldn't have helped with those anyway, since they were shot later. So this is really a separate question from the OP. I'm not sure the best way to sync such things, except to note that they're all recorded to the same click so they're at least in tempo. There would need to be some type of common "beginning of song" zero reference between the live takes and later lip-sync video. How do people handle that?

 

[fuzzfilth]

48 minutes ago, reggoboy said:

So this is really a separate question from the OP

You are the OP. I feel like I'm talking to an AI.

[Dave K]

2 hours ago, fuzzfilth said:

You are the OP. I feel like I'm talking to an AI.

Haha yes. Here I refer to the "original post", not the "original poster".  I always hate when I go to a forum with a good question and the answer wasn't there, so I try to give back to the community by making sure the posts have complete and useful info. The next person will thank me 🙂 In this case, you guys offered an excellent partial solution. But it would still be useful to know the date/time of the track audio in Logic, which is what I asked for in the OP.

As for my most recent question about some universal "beginning of song" reference for the lip-sync videos, I think that is probably more of a video question, so I may post that to a Final Cut Pro forum 🙂

[fuzzfilth]

I see. There is no concept of "this is the start of the song", neither in video nor audio.

You can move audio regions in Logic to their original record position, but still this is relative to the start of the Logic project, not day time.