Need Help with Flow and Timing with Music

[Rob Kahn]

When you put the music on the timeline there are two things you can do. A double L (press L twice quickly) will show you your waveform. With dynamic music this will give you a visual aid for the beat and crescendos. If you hold down the control (command) key while you can scrub the audio. If you hold control (command) while pressing on the mouse you can sample a few frames froom the playhead. If you press the period key on the number pad, you can play just the music. The asterisk key creates a layer marker. If you tap the asterisks key while the music is playing you can mark on the fly. (on the beat, to the sound etc). The layer markers won

[Joe Cinquina]

Thank you for your fast response. I will try a couple of these strategies. Some I already have. I still feel a disconnect form the passion of the music and the inspiration on the fly that you get in Premiere. When you take it into AE it becomes tedium.

Thanks Again.

Joe

[Ben G unguren]

After Effects is not a real-time editor, which means (in your case) pressing the space bar doesn’t play the sound, because pressing the space bar doesn’t play in real time — rather, it takes as long as it needs to calculate / composite each frame. When I have had to do a lot of sync work, I have either used the asterisk trick suggested by rob, or else work in an editing program and place some kind of “marker” (like a few frames of text) to tell me where one part starts and another one ends. Or just write down the timecode in QT player where each thing is supposed to happen.

In AE you can generally move stuff around in time pretty easily. So if you know you need a title to come in over 2 seconds, you can make the 2-second move first, in the general area where it will go, and then slide it around in time until you have it at the right spot with the sound. (In case you didn’t know, press the zero key on your numeric keypad to RAM preview, which plays video and audio in real time.)

ben