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Need a Motion-based way to stutter-cut to an EDM music beat: DROP THE BASS
Mark or Simon, you’ve probably got a tutorial on this technique somewhere… but if you could help me out, I’m copy-pasting my request from the FCPX forum into here, since it looks like the real answer has to come from within MOTION.
Two-part question. I ask it here because for good or ill, FCPX users are sometimes stereotyped as “kids” and a youthful “kid”‘s help is just what I need right now, if you’re familiar with EDM (electronic dance music), that stuff that goes “oonce-oonce-oonce-oonce…” for what seems like forever. If you are familiar with EDM and/ or “House” music, tell me what this technique is in this video, what’s it called when the beat keeps doubling and doubling to a crescendo, followed by a sussur or break. A typical representative example is in this you tube clip between the 47 second and one minute marks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsApjk6tOhA
Part two of the question: now that you’ve schooled me on what that accellerating beat-mixing/effect technique is called, I am building a similar track, in Garage Band ( Could use royalty free sample links BTW) and then in FCPX and/or more likely Motion 4 or 5, I want to cut between two tracks, a b-roll track and a graphics/text track, where the cuts all match that ever-doubling beat. With the beats starting at 120BPM and only accelerating the whole time, no way I’m going to hand-keyframe that.
I could buy the crumple-pop BPM plug-in I suppose, but maybe one of you knows a fast, efficient, slick and free way to get the same effect, automated to the beats?
I was thinking; use the audio behavior to auto-keyframe the opacity of a layer of black or chroma green, to generate a patterend matte layer so my b-roll of dancers or whatever stutters between images and black, then I’m thinking I change blending modes to get the black to reveal the text track underneath? Or is there a better way? “Better” meaning faster and easier.
Muchas Gracias
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6 Replies
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I cheated, because I’m on deadline, and bought the FCPX Effects “BPM” plug-in because it was on a Father’s Day sale price. When I got it, I thought it would read the incoming audio and then apply an opacity change, like what I’m trying to do in Motion 4 and 5. But it’s really more of just a “blink” generator, with variable timing and a choice of how the opacity or other effect ramps in and out. You have to already know how many beats per minute the music is, then type that into a slider box, but it DOES quickly give the effect I needed. As the music builds towards the “drop”, and that drum pattern keeps accelerating, I just took the initial 130 beats per minute and kept doubling that on each 4th downbeat, got exactly the look I needed.
When I get some slack time, I’m going back to work on a Motion version of this though, where the music drives the parameter variable to change opacity between 100 and 0. When I crack this, I’ll share it here.
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Lack of progress report: I thought this would be easy, but I’m missing some little ingredient. In this screen grab, what I *think* I have done is tie the opacity level to the audio peaks of some Skrillex music, so that the transient base beats should blink out whatever goes into the drop zone. But it’s not working.
Anybody wanna collaborate on the answer?
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You need a negative Scale value if you want Opacity to decrease as it reacts to the volume of the input frequency.
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Mark Spencer
Freelance Producer/Editor/Motion Graphics Artist
Apple-certified Master Trainer
Author, Motion 4 from Peachpit Press
https://www.applemotion.net -
That did the trick! Here’s a screen grab of my settings for others to use as a starting point.
The next thing I need to do to it is learn how to get it to accept the audio in the FCPX timeline, instead of having to first set up a song to it in Motion 5. The selection box that’s defaulted to Skrillex right now can be changed to “master”, but when I save that out to publish, then apply to a video track in FCPX, it either still uses the Skrillex music as the trigger, or doesn’t trigger at all. What do I do to connect the FCPX audio track I want, to the effect, outside of round-tripping to motion and adding whatever sound track I want in there?
Thanks for the help!
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You can’t make it work in FCP X. Only in Motion.
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Mark Spencer
Freelance Producer/Editor/Motion Graphics Artist
Apple-certified Master Trainer
Author, Motion 4 from Peachpit Press
https://www.applemotion.net -
Well, that’s a drag. But thanks for the clarification. It just means an extra round-tripping step.
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