Editing | "You Can't Stop the Beat" Actor's Fund Video | How to create a musical compilation video

Hi, I'm Allie with Apples and Oranges, and today I'm going to walk you through how to make a video similar to these that have been produced by Broadway shows. I recently worked on one to benefit the Actors Fund, and I'm going to show you how I went about doing it and a technique that worked for me. I hope you find it helpful too. I took a lot of time in making sure that my folders were really organized. Once I had every folder in place, I went into Final Cut and created a new library specifically for this project. Here it is. It's called BTS Final Cut Pro. From there, I would create new events for each vocal part, each musician section, or each choreographical part. So this project was really complicated in that it had 6 different vocal parts, 2 different dance parts, as well as musicians. So for each of those specific events, I would label them and then import the media specific to that section. The more I edit and the more I learn through this process, organization is absolutely key. And once you have the footage really organized, you can manipulate it in ways that are really easy. You can switch footage in and out, you can keyword and find footage. So that was really useful. So now it's time to import footage. For Vocals 1, I'm going to import the media for that section and that section alone. I always say leave files in place so that the library itself remains small and it just references the media. Here I have a video of the lovely Pamela Winslow Kashani. Now that I have my media in place, I'm going to actually add some other unrelated nature footage so that you all can see how it works when you're layering footage on top of one another. Okay, great. Now we have some extra footage that we can work with. We're going to create a new project. Okay, great. Name it whatever is appropriate for your project. For this one, we're just going to say YouTube Behind the Scenes. I'm sure you've seen these styles of videos that have been coming out of this time during quarantine have a lot of different singers on screen simultaneously resized in a number of different ways throughout the project. Something that I found to be really useful was this plugin called Grid. It really, really easily allowed me to resize footage specifically to the grid guidelines so that I was positive that everything was equal in size. It does have to sit on top of the footage, and because I was working with such a large timeline, I would add I would add a basic title at the very top of my timeline and put the grid on top of that. The great thing about this grid is that it's super, super customizable. It was really a lifesaver when it came to resizing footage. Here are the controls of the grid function. First of all, I'd make sure the opacity was 100% so that the lines were really distinctive. Next, I would stretch the height and the width to make sure it covered the entire screen. You can also change the color of the cross sections, which I definitely took advantage of, but I tended to keep with more of the brighter, the blues here that you see, because I thought it was easier to see where the grid boxes were. But just for example, I'm gonna turn each of the cross sections white just so you can see how you can easily manipulate the color of the grid as well. And then the holy grail of the grid function, was that you could manipulate the horizontal and vertical guides. This meant you could change the size of the boxes vertically and horizontally to make sure that you had just as many as you needed or that the guides were bigger or smaller for your particular moment in the project. And that to me was unbelievably useful. Okay, now I'm going to add in some other footage so I can show you a couple of the other tricks and tips that help me in editing. If you're doing a musical piece, it's of course really important that you're lining up the vocals in line with the track. The vocals of the singers on screen were actually the vocals we were hearing in the sound mix. So for this project, it was important that everyone was synchronized. It was important that I had musicians, vocalists, and dancers lined up really specifically in my timeline. Okay, now let's play around with resizing footage. Let's say I wanted to resize this clip of the beach. I would go to the transform function right here, and I would find scale all on the very right-hand side. And I would learn what percentage of 100% of each video needed to be in order to be scaled perfectly in this section. Let's say I wanted this video to take up exactly 4 squares. As you can see here, I'm doing a little bit more transform, and then I can crop to make sure that it's completely perfect. Then if I wanted to go in and then resize this footage of Pamela, I knew that it was about 15 to 13%, and I could easily type that into scale all rather than having to pull the transform in and out, up and down, and I could put it in the 4 squares where I wanted it to live. Now because of the way her footage was shot, she's a little bit further away from the camera than I would like, so I'm going to transform her to be bigger within the 4 squares, and then I'm going to do a crop function to make sure that she perfectly sits where I would like her to. But ultimately, once you know the size and the percentage of the footage, it's so much easier to transform it and resize it and then put it in these small boxes. Otherwise, it's a really laborious process. And don't get me wrong, it was a little laborious in general, but it honestly saved me tons of time knowing that I could transform it to a percentage and I could go from there. Something that I've noticed about a lot of these videos, which I really like, is that they have lines separating the footage so that it looks clean and organized. While I used this grid as a guideline, I actually generated the lines by drawing them in a Motion project and exported them as a generator, which is what you're seeing here. I then laid them on top of the timeline. Once you know that the timecode of the project is not going to change, I exported a really low-res movie file to put underneath the Motion project and then drew the lines on top of that. Once you know that the general look and feel of the piece isn't going to change and the timing is solidified, that's when we went in and drew the line. So I would say it was about 3/4 through the project as a whole. So we had to make sure that creatively everyone was on the same page before we added this element. But once we did, it really changed the game for the look and feel of the project. So as most of us editors know, there's a rule of thirds when looking at a 16:9 screen. But Final Cut doesn't necessarily have a built-in function that makes it easy to draw those lines. So I actually did a quick Google search and found this amazing downloadable PNG from a website and it was a free download. I'll link it in the description below because it was a lifesaver for me. What you could do is again, just like the grid function, layer this on top of your project. So while this grid isn't actually editable as the other one that I showed you earlier, it gives you really clear guidelines for if you're doing a smaller project. At the beginning of this project, there were 2 people on screen, 3 people on screen, 6, and then 9. So this was a really cool guideline for me to work with rather than incorporating the larger grid at that point. What we're looking at here is the final matrix of the video that I just edited for the Actors Fund. In total, there are 144 videos in this matrix, and if you know Final Cut or any editing software, it's really hard for the computer to process 144 videos at the same time. What I ended up doing was taking that last piece of video that I needed and actually copying and pasting it and editing it on a separate library completely, and then exporting that as a movie file and tacking it on to the project. That, to me, saved a lot of time. The rendering didn't take as long, and ultimately having it as a movie file was extremely beneficial for me in the editing process. I actually ended up doing the same thing with the credits, which also helped the rendering process, and I'm really glad that I did. Another really helpful tip for me was to turn off background rendering during this process because it wasn't constantly trying to render as many clips as there were in the timeline. There's a shortcut to render the whole project, which is Ctrl+Shift+R, which I found really useful. Or if you want to just render a certain section, Shift+R will do that for you as well. So within Final Cut Pro, I utilized a couple of keyframing motions to help move the videos to to make it a little more dynamic. So what I'm going to show you here is a really simple way to keyframe something across the screen. For this example, I'm going to use this footage right here. I'm going to keyframe within the first frame and then I'm going to skip to the end and keyframe maybe a frame or two before the end. And then I'm going to hold down the Shift key and move it how I want it to and holding on, Shift key helps it to move in a straight line. So say for example I want this to move from right to left out of this screen. Now keep in mind this is a 45-second video, so it's going to move pretty slowly once we render it out, but you'll get the idea. And as I'm sure many of you know, you can use keyframes within the middle of the footage. You can add as many as you want. If I wanted to make this move from down to the top of the screen at this point, I could add another keyframe You can really manipulate it to do whatever you want to do. For this example, I just did a really simple right-to-left, but again, you can make it as crazy as you would like. Well, I thank you guys so much for watching. I hope this gave you a little bit of an insight into how I did this video and edited it. Again, I'm sure there's lots of ways you can do it and lots of amazing techniques. If you're willing to share any tips or tricks with me, I would love to hear them. I thank you for watching. I hope you subscribe to our YouTube channel and leave a comment to let me know what other videos you'd like to see in the future. Thank you so much, and be sure to check out the You Can't Stop the Beat video on the Actors Fund YouTube channel, and I'll link that below as well. Thank you so much and have an amazing day.