Hey guys, whats up.
This is Serge,
and welcome back to my channel.
Today, we’ll take a look
at how you can easily cut your videos
to the music beat, using Beat Mark 2 from Ulti Media.
The new Beat Mark 2 plugin
analyzes your song,
and adds markers on every beat.
You can then export it as an XML file,
and import it into Final Cut Pro,
with markers placed on every beat.
This video isn’t sponsored,
but I do have 5 free licenses
for Beat Mark 2 to give away.
I’ll tell you how you can enter to win
one of these at the end of this video.
Let’s open up Beat Mark 2 and get started.
Grab your song you want to use,
and drag and drop it into Beat Mark 2.
Select your frame rate
you want to use for your project,
and open the Preferences window.
If your song has a consistent tempo,
select the Standard analysis type.
If the tempo in your song changes,
use Peak Filter.
Alternately, you can select the Audio Peak analysis
to mark the parts of your song with vocals.
With your preferences set,
close the preference window,
and hit the Beat Mark button.
Beat Mark 2 analyzes your selected song,
adds markers on every beat
and opens up in a separate timeline,
very similar to Final Cut Pro.
There is a few more options you can adjust here.
First up, is the Mark First Quarter box.
Zoom in on your timeline
until you can see each individual markers,
and scroll back to the start of the song.
Press the play button
to start playing your song,
and listen for the first beat.
Once you identify the marker closest to the first beat,
select the Mark First quarter check box,
and click on the identified marker.
This changes the color of every fourth marker,
making it much easier to identify the start of each measure.
You can also select this checkbox
to Suggest Cuts every four loops
giving you a different color marker every measure.
As far as exporting,
you can either select to just mark Beats in your Asset
to export your song as an XML file with markers,
or you can also choose to Create a New Event and Project.
This way, when you import this XML into Final Cut Pro,
it’ll open up in its own separate event,
with your song in a new project.
Selecting the Create Placeholder option
will also add placeholder clips above your song,
cut on every beat.
Let’s make a new project with placeholder clips,
and see how easy it is to edit to the music beat
in Final Cut Pro.
Click Continue to Export an FCPXML file,
and close Beat Mark 2.
You can find your exported file
in the same location as your original song,
which in my case, is right on my desk top.
Let’s open up Final Cut Pro,
and import our new XML file.
From the menu bar select File,
Import and XML.
Select your file, and click Import.
This may take a little bit of time,
because Final Cut Pro has to import your file,
make a new event,
and a new project with placeholder clips.
Once your import is complete,
you will see a new even in your library,
with the same name as your song.
Inside this event you’ll find your new project.
Double click it to open it up.
If you zoom in on your timeline,
you can see that every beat is marked with a blue marker,
start of every measure is a red marker,
and every four measures is marked with a green marker.
There’s also placeholder clips
connected to the timeline between every beat.
For this demo, we only need about 15 seconds of music,
so skim your timeline,
and find the closest green marker.
Place your playhead on this marker,
select your music clip,
and press Command B to blade it.
Delete the second part of the clip,
and drag in the fade handle to fade out the music.
Next, let’s replace the placeholder clips with our own.
Grab your first clip,
and drag it down into your timeline,
over the placeholder clip
until it’s highlighted and you see a filmstrip icon.
From the popup menu,
select either Replace from Start or Replace from End.
This way, Final Cut Pro ripple trims your clip
to the same length as the placeholder clip.
For this first clip,
let’s ripple trim the start of it to the start of our project,
and the end to the first red marker.
Delete the placeholder clips above it.
Grab your second clip,
and drag it into your timeline
to replace the next placeholder clip.
Once again, select either Replace from Start
or Replace from End.
Keep doing this to replace every placeholder clip.
If you want your video clip to last longer than one beat,
simply ripple trim it to the length you want,
and delete the placeholder clips above it.
Just make sure all your cuts are lined up with the markers.
Once you’re done,
your cuts in your project will line up perfectly
with the beats in your music,
for a much more pleasant viewing experience.
Besides cutting your video to music,
Beat Mark 2 is also very handy
if you need to change the duration of your song.
You blade your clip right on the markers,
and either delete or duplicate parts
of your song to make it shorter or longer.
Cutting the clip on similar beats,
will make your cuts virtually inaudible to the listener.
Now for the giveaway.
To enter to win one of the 5 free licenses,
all you have to do is comment on this video.
I will post a YouTube story in a couple days,
and randomly pick 5 winners.
Make sure you’re subscribed to my channel
to see my story.
If you don’t win, you can buy Beat Mark 2
for around 10 USD from the Ulti Media website,
which I’ll have linked in the description below.
If you edit your videos to music,
trust me, this will be 10 dollars well spent.
I hope you found this video helpful,
and if you did, let me know by hitting the like button.
If you’re new here,
make sure to check out the rest of my channel for more tutorials.
New videos uploaded every week.
Thanks for watching,
and I’ll see you back here next week.