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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

speeding up a song for video shoot?

Brandon Fraley

Brandon Fraley

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how would you go about speeding up a track for playback so we can shoot ip sync in slow mo? I tried "change tempo" in Audacity, but it doesn't sound very good.
 
speed it up in FCP and export the track. I did it for my short musical. We had a 5min steadicam shot with ramping in the middle of it. we doubled the speed only for that part of the song and then we went back to normal speed. it worked with no problem.
 
yep, thats what i did. sounded better than audacity, but still not perfect. If anyone has a better solution I'd still be interested to hear it.
 
There's a freeware or shareware app called Amazing Slow Downer. Stupid name, but it works well. It can change speed without changing pitch and change pitch without changing speed. I found it by accident and used it for a shoot and it was much more pleasant to have the song playing at it's normal pitch though faster, instead of chipmunks style.
 
i've always wanted to try this. they did a little bit of this in Seether/Amy Lee's "Broken" video.
 
melodyne seems to have the lead in pitch/time correction.

But why do you need a perfect track here? It's just for playback. As long as the rhythm is maintained why do you care for quality?
 
because the vocal performance is fairly nuanced and I want it to be as easily heard and matched as possible. The Audacity conversion and even the FCP version sounds what i can only think to call "low res". You can here it skip chuncks to quickly get to the next piece. Id like to be able to hear all the nuance, just very fast, and I'm not really getting it.

I don't know enough about to audio to really understand how this works.
 
Brandon, here's a link to a video I just finished where we slowed down AND sped up the action. Shot at 48fps and 9fps. The band uses a click track system for playback so I had them slow or speed the song according to the percentage I was shooting off-speed. Does your band have any audio software they can work with? Programs like Logic, Digital Performer, Nuendo will have much better stretching algorithms.

http://www.purevolume.com/videos/279
 
Jesse, very cool concept BTW

yeah, the artist could probably do it better than i could, but i was trying to do it myself because I'm preparing some tests to show him instead of a written treatment. He doesn't know the concept yet.

Anyway, let me explain why this is an issue. 2 things really, like I said it's a nuanced vocal performance, and I'm only concerned with matching the vocals. In your video, the song (like it should) pretty much stays to the beat. guitars, drums, even vocals dont stray very far, but my guy's vocals tend to wonder, so a straight click won't help match it.

Also, unlike your video, I'm going for one take, which means I can't cut away when a part doesn't match or when theres something more interesting going on elsewhere.

ALSO! I'm shooting for 72fps, but we'll see if he can pull it off. In my FCP tests, 200% speed was manageable for me to lip sync along to, but 300%? youch, it was tough. So I'm really going to try to get the highest quality playback possible so you can really try to hear those little bits that sound like they were thrown away in my FCP test.

we'll see
 
Why not shoot 72fps the whole time, but have the music speed up and slow down. Have it go from normal speed to 72fps sped up....

Then, in post, you simply time remap (ramp) the video to match the vocals. so, in essence, you are ramping your video up and down to match the lip movement. might get tricky, but if you pulled it off, it might be cool.
 
cool? sure, but sounds super difficult. I'm waiting for #1853 to arrive before we shoot, so as soon as it does I'll have to test with it.
 
Jesse Rosten said:
Brandon, here's a link to a video I just finished where we slowed down AND sped up the action. Shot at 48fps and 9fps. The band uses a click track system for playback so I had them slow or speed the song according to the percentage I was shooting off-speed. Does your band have any audio software they can work with? Programs like Logic, Digital Performer, Nuendo will have much better stretching algorithms.

http://www.purevolume.com/videos/279
Click to expand...

Very well put together. Nice effect.
 
We've shot several music videos using final cut to speed up and export the audio at 125%, 150%, or in one case 200%. Then just shoot at the appropriate frame rates (30, 36, or 48 respectively) and cut away. Works like a charm, and pitch doesn't particularly matter since you should be laying that same mastered track down over the video after the fact.
 
well, and FCP has a pitch corrector, which i used
 
best results - use sound track pro,
under "process" select time stretch. For easy calculation change the time base to frames and work out your new frame count and just punch in the new numbers, this way you don't need to worry about pitch control.
Used it many times and works for us.
 
i tried the soundtrack pro thing and i think it actually did work a lot better :) only thing now is i cant figure out how to export the damn thing! i go file/export/ but then the three options are unhighlighted! what do i do???
 
Brandon,

Given your explanation of the project, I'd say your artists is going to need some time to rehearse the sped up lip sync. Practice makes perfect! Also, depending on the speed of the song, 72 fps could be way too fast. We did 48fps in the example I posted and the drummer could barely keep up.
 
Jesse Rosten said:
Brandon,

Given your explanation of the project, I'd say your artists is going to need some time to rehearse the sped up lip sync. Practice makes perfect! Also, depending on the speed of the song, 72 fps could be way too fast. We did 48fps in the example I posted and the drummer could barely keep up.
Click to expand...

agreed. We're not shooting until #1853 arrives so he'll have plenty of time to practice. And the song is a very plodding laid back song, which is why i came up with the slomo idea, the lyrics are slow enough i thought i could pull off the 72fps thing. Like i said, as slow as they are, 300% faster and it was freakin hard for me to nail it, but i'm hoping with a few weeks to practice he'll be able to do it. If not, we can always do it slower, since 200% was simple for even me to do.
 
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