- This video is sponsored by Musicbed
and at the end of the video, we're gonna talk about the 2022
Musicbed Challenge that you can enter to win some amazing
prizes that will seriously help your filmmaking
so make sure to watch all the way through
to find out how you can win.
Okay, so you just got finished editing a video
and something doesn't quite feel right.
You go back, you check the edits, the transitions,
the color grading, and it all looks pretty good to you
but something still seems off.
This is when you realize that while you were spending all
of that time working on the visual side of things,
you weren't paying any attention to how it interacted
with the music.
What is up people?
Dunna here, and in this video, we're gonna be talking
about the importance of music in your videos
and I'm gonna be giving you some tips
and tricks that you can use while editing
to music to make your editing feel way better.
The video is split into a handful of different sections
and you can use the chapter markers down below to hop around
or to go back and re-watch something again.
So secure the cup and let's drop the beat.
(bright music)
Let's kick things off by talking about why music
and editing to the music makes a huge difference
of the feel in your videos.
There are a couple of little psychological things happening
here that you can use to influence your audience.
The first one is that a video that's edited nicely
with the music feels more glued together.
When the visuals and the audio are in sync,
they feel like one cohesive piece of entertainment,
and if you really nail this, it can feel like the music
that you chose was specifically written for that video.
Also, we can create patterns for the audience to get pulled
into and also break those patterns to grab their attention
when we want to.
You can guide your audience in and out of sections
of the video and point them to important cues.
By rhythmically and repeatedly cutting to the music,
the audience starts to feel like they know what to expect,
but then, when the moment is right,
if you hold onto one shot a little bit longer
or cut a little bit quicker, it will bring importance
to that part and make sure that the audience
doesn't get bored.
It's kind of like a dance.
You can do the same moves over and over for a while
and that's okay but every once in a while,
you want to toss in a special move or a spin
to keep things exciting and fresh.
Now, one thing that I want to point out early on
in this video is that while this can be a helpful tool
in your kit, it's not always the right tool for the job.
For example, if you're doing some narrative filmmaking
and there's a dialogue scene between two characters,
editing to the music probably isn't the way to go
and it's a most likely more important to edit
around the dialogue.
But if you're doing a product montage or an action sequence
where the music is going to be a heavy influence
in the pacing of the scene, it can really enhance that.
It's an ongoing joke amongst filmmakers and content creators
that choosing the right music can be incredibly difficult
and having to change that music later on
can be devastating, basically.
So here's a few things that you can be thinking
about when choosing the music for your video.
First, think about the energy of the scene.
(upbeat music) Is it fast-paced,
high energy, lots of action
(gentle music) or is it laid back and chill?
(dramatic music) Is there a specific mood
or emotion that really encompasses the scene?
Start there when choosing music and look for music
that also has the same energy, and just a quick plug
of the sponsor, Musicbed has great filter controls
when you're searching for music on their site.
You can literally choose angry or sad or chill if you want.
The next thing to keep in mind is the subject of your video.
Think about who or what your video is about
and what kind of music makes sense for that subject.
(light air music) If you're doing a documentary
about a person who lives off the grid in the mountains,
maybe some rootsy folk rock
(upbeat music) or if it's a commercial
for an electronic device, maybe some futuristic
dance music makes sense.
In movies and theater, music composers will write
specific themes to go along important characters
and that music will play when the character is either
on screen or involved.
Not only is it a hint to get you thinking about
that character, it's a great way to influence
your emotions surrounding that character as well.
(gentle suspenseful music) If the music is scary
or angry every time we see the villain,
it's a cue for us to know that that's the villain.
(triumphant music) If it's happy and triumphant,
that sounds more like the music for a hero.
And even though we might not have the budget
to hire Hans Zimmer to write our music, we can borrow some
of these principles when choosing the right music
to match our subject.
And lastly, when choosing the music, think about the setting
in which your scene takes place.
Remember those character themes that I was talking
about like 12 seconds ago?
Well, that can also go for locations and settings too.
(bright upbeat music) So if your video is on a farm,
maybe a little bit of country music.
If it's talking about something that happened in the 1960s,
maybe a little bit of old school rock and roll.
If the music matches the environment,
it can really help glue things together.
So let's pick some music for our scene.
Okay, so I have actually already picked the music
that we're using for this video but just to show you a bit
of that process, I go to Musicbed, click on songs
on the top left here, and then on the left hand side,
there are all these filters so I can choose rock
and cinematic and then under mood, I can choose serious
'cause what I was looking for was kind of a rocky energetic
movie vibe and so I went through a bunch of these
and it actually ended up being this one up at the top here,
"Thunderbird" that ended up being the one that I chose,
and it sounds something like this.
(suspenseful music)
(upbeat suspenseful music)
Once you've chosen the music, it's not gonna
do you much good if you don't know how to count music
or more importantly, how to feel music.
Now, you may have just scoffed because being able
to feel the beat of a piece of music is second nature
to you and it seems really easy, but I taught drum lessons
for long enough to know that having a natural talent
for feeling the beat is a very different experience
for everyone.
Some people can just do it and some people have
to work a little bit harder to learn.
So here are a few pointers that should help.
First of all, the majority of popular music
that we hear today is in what we call 4/4 time.
What this means is that the music is made up
of four beats that repeat and we call these four beats
sections a measure or a bar.
A lot of people can probably just feel
those beats naturally.
They're the thing that you might tap your foot to
or nod your head to.
(upbeat music) One, two, three, four,
one, two, three, four.
But if you're having some trouble finding the beat,
listening to the drums can be a good place to start.
In a simple drum beat, you'll generally hear a kick drum
like this (kick drum beating)
on the one and the three beat and a snare drum
like this (snare drum beating)
on the two and the four.
Something like this,
one, two, three, four.
(upbeat music)
Unfortunately, drum beats can get a lot more complicated
than this and well, songs don't always have drums playing
all the time but it's a decent place to start.
Once we figured out the beat of our song and we can start
counting bars, those bars are typically in groupings
of two, four, eight or 16, and that makes sections
of the song feel symmetrical.
This will come in handy in a few minutes when we're trying
to rearrange our song to fit the timing that we need.
The problem with these foundational rules is
that while they apply to so many songs out there,
especially in current popular music styles,
they also get broken constantly so it's really important
to do your best to listen to and understand the music
that you choose.
Even just identifying the little changes in parts of a song
or the different important sections will help a lot even
if they don't fit those neat and tidy guidelines I talked
about before.
With that said, let's talk about actually editing the music
that we chose.
(bright music)
It's a beautiful thing when you can find a section
of a song that works perfectly with the length
and shape that you wanted to have for your sequence,
but it doesn't happen very often so we need to be able
to cut up the music to fit what we need.
This is very similar to cutting up and editing video clips,
but there are a few little important things
that you should know.
First of all, audio files act slightly different
than video files.
With videos, we're used to dealing in frames.
There will be 24 30, 60 frames per second
and we make our cuts on those frames.
With audio, it's recorded in samples and there are
at least 44,100 samples per second
or more depending on the file.
So when we make our edits, we can get a lot finer control
and be significantly more accurate, which is a good thing
because our ears are ridiculously sensitive
to little timing issues in music.
If we try and cut a piece out and make it seamless,
we need to have that extra control.
That being said, if you're editing audio
within a video editing software, you may need to figure out
how to access the proper setting because by default,
it may force you to edit using frames rather
than the samples.
Potentially, the most important thing when it comes
to editing audio is learning how
to read the audio wave forms.
Big spikes in the wave form are loud sounds
and might be a good place to look for kick drums
or snare drums. (upbeat music)
A lot of the time we're going to want to make our cuts right
at these points.
So just like we would when we edit video,
we want to cut down certain parts of our music
to match the length and intensity of the video
that we're trying to make.
If the video needs a buildup, we need to find the parts
of the music that will make that happen
or maybe we need a section to be a little bit longer
to fill the space.
If we can find a good looping point, we can copy and paste
that to take up a little bit more time.
The key here is really just identifying
and chopping up the parts that you might want
and then trying different ways to reassemble them.
And again, just like editing video, there is some trial
and error involved for sure.
And one of the most difficult parts of editing music
for a video is finding a good ending for the music,
but I have a little trick that I like to do
and I'll show you that in a second.
So first things first, we're gonna have
to chop this song down quite a bit.
It's three and a half minutes long and we want to get
about 30 seconds of audio for our sequence.
(suspenseful music) It starts off
with this really nice long build but we don't need the
whole thing so we're gonna do some chopping up
of this section.
Because there's no beat in this intro section,
I can be a little more flexible with where I make my cut
so I'm just trying a bunch of different combinations
to see what feels best, and then I'm adding a cross fade
transition to make it smoothly go from one clip to the next.
I was able to make it quite a bit shorter
and now it sounds like this. (suspenseful music)
After that intro buildup, the beat comes in
and I'm going to start counting.
This specific song gets more intense usually
every four bars, but what I want to do are make those
sections a little bit shorter
so we get through the build faster.
So I'm gonna get two bars into each section.
I'm gonna make a cut and then I'm gonna cut at the start
of the next section and move that back.
(upbeat suspenseful music)
At this point, I'm just repeating the process
of shortening each small section until we get
to the big drop that's coming a little bit later
in the song.
(upbeat suspenseful music)
Now, once again, this section of the song is a little bit
longer than I want it to be so we're gonna have
to chop it down but we want to try and look
for a good note to end on, something that kind of hangs out
in the air a bunch.
(upbeat suspenseful music)
I really like the ending of that chorus section
but it goes into another section so we're gonna have
to do a couple of things to to make it seem more seamless
and not such an abrupt ending.
So first, we're gonna find the start of that last hit
and we're gonna make a cut there.
Then we're gonna bring that down onto another track
and I'm gonna duplicate it and move it way off to the end.
I'm gonna highlight both of those
and I'm gonna create a compound clip.
Then I'm gonna go to effects and I'm gonna add a reverb
onto that compound clip.
This is where I can mess around with some of the settings
in the reverb to make it nice and long.
This plate reverb sounds pretty good.
Then I'm going to shorten that compound clip
so it's only as long as I want it to be, basically ignoring
that duplicate that I made later on.
Then I'm gonna fade out the reverb and combine it
with the original using fade ins and fade outs on each
of these small little clips.
And what we get in the end is that one hit with a nice,
smooth reverb tail.
And here's what the edit music sounds like altogether.
You can see all the cuts on your screen.
(suspenseful music)
(upbeat suspenseful music)
So with all that lead up, our music is ready
and we can now edit our video to the music.
Sometimes, I'll already have done a rough draft
of the video, edit without music just to get the important
clips on the timeline and the order I think I want them,
and other times, I'll get the music all ready first.
There's nothing super fancy about this part of the process
if you know how to cut, adjust, and move video clips around
on your timeline, but there are a few little things
that can help make it lined up nicely.
Just like when we were editing the audio,
we want to be keeping an eye on the audio wave forms
and that will be the best way to know
if our clips are landing with the beat.
We can also use markers on our timeline as easy places
to snap our video clips too.
You can play the music in your timeline and press the M key
to the beat or to mark important beats
or spots where you might want your clips.
It's important to go in and adjust these markers afterwards,
though as there can be a slight delay in your marking
or you might have just been slightly out of time
when you pressed it.
Also as mentioned before, audio is in samples
and video is in frames so there's a chance that a beat
of your music may land between two frames
and you won't be able to line the video clip up perfectly.
In general, when this happens, I find it usually works best
to place the clip just before the beat
rather than just after it.
Visually, I find this makes it feel like it's hitting
on that beat better, and when you're using transitions
between clips, you're gonna wanna play with the timing
of the transition in relation to the music.
For the most part, I find I want my transition
to land with the beat of the music so I end up placing the
end of the transition over the beat rather than the center
of it where the cut is between clips.
So let's go ahead and see how this edit turned out.
(suspenseful music)
(upbeat suspenseful music)
So as you can see, making sure that your music
and your video are in alignment with each other
can be a really effective way
to step up your video productions.
And as with anything else in the world of video production,
all of these rules can be bent, broken,
or completely ignored if that's what works
to enhance the main point being put forward.
But it's great to know of these guidelines
so you can choose when to use them and when not to.
Now, here's how you can put the skills that you just learned
to action and potentially win some amazing prizes for it.
The Musicbed Challenge is back for 2022
and Musicbed is challenging you to make the film
that you've been dreaming about.
There are three categories of videos that you can choose
to make, documentary, narrative, or spec ad,
and each of these categories has industry-leading judges
that are going to see your work.
Musicbed has selected a playlist of music for each category
and you need to use at least 10 seconds of one of the songs
in your video.
There will be winners in each category
as well as a people's choice winner
and the prizes are amazing and could make a huge difference
for you and your videos.
Submissions open on April 12th so you can click the link
in the description to download your starter kit,
get all the details, and start working
on your masterpiece now.
This is a huge opportunity for up and coming filmmakers
so thank you to Musicbed for putting this on
and for sponsoring this video.
If you enjoy the video, make sure to hit that like button,
subscribe, and hit the bell notification
so you don't miss out on future videos.
Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.
(bright music)