Software for making CH Videos

[Toodo]

Yes all help is welcome :)

[alchemi183]

I'm not planning on making a CH, but I'm so impressed by the level of knowledge and the help that's being offered in this thread!

[Maskeraid]

HUGE POST WARNING!!!! LOL!

OK, so here's a run down on how I set my beats up for a CH round. Obviously this may differ from how others do it since other people use different software and probably have a better way (I use Sony Vegas btw.. )


NOTE1: Right Click and 'view image' on any of the pics to see them at full size...
NOTE2: The rows within Sony Vegas are called tracks. I just wanted to highlight this in case there is any confusion between track as in a song, or track as in the row in the software. Sony vegas has two different types of 'track', one for audio and one for video. they look almost identical except the video ones show thumbnails of the videos and the audio ones show the audio waveform of the song.

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I'll begin by showing you what the entire interface looks like to me on Sony Vegas:

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I have a dual monitor set-up, so the left hand side is where I watch and select transitions/files etc.. the right is the tracks for editing. On a Single monitor all of this is condensed into the same window... (which I hate.)

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The next image is a screenshot of what a typical "completed" round looks like for me with a key on the left:

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There is nothing in the audio tracks for the videos because I tend to remove the audio from all of the footage I use until later rounds. Pressing 'U' on a file in Vegas Unlinks the audio from the video allowing you to simply delete it. Once the audio has been removed I keep the tracks in between purely as dividers between the remaining video files. Deleting the audio is optional even if you don't use it, you could just simply leave the audio tracks muted. (the little blue circle with a line through it mutes that track)

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The screenshot below is a blank template I made for use in Sony Vegas solely for creating CH videos.

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- The top two bars are for my beat meters and any other images I intend to overlay on top of the videos.
- Rows 3-18 (numbered on the left hand side) are used for the videos that I will splice together to make the video, the dark grey tracks are for the audio tracks that belong to the videos. (They are dark grey because they're muted.)
- The bottom two rows highlighted in RED are the two Rows I use for Audio. (beats and song)
- I add or remove tracks as needed but this is the base I begin with.

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Onto the matter at hand: BEATS!

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This next image is a view of the bottom two tracks:

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The upper track has the song I am using for this current round. The bottom is empty besides one lonely snare sound effect all the way to the left, that I use for my beats.

My task now is to align the beat sound effect to match that with the beats of the song like so:

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I repeat this step until I have 8 or 16 beats aligned like so:

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Since the beat of all music is in multiples of 4, setting up 8 or 16 beats in time like this allows me to copy+paste those beats along the entire song to make all of my beats:

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This saves SOOOOOO much time its unbelievable. However, I still go back and check all the beats are aligned right to ensure one or two arent slightly out of time. I tend to just listen to it to do this. It's pretty easy to tell just by listening if a beat is slightly out, especially if you adjust the volume of the beats to be slightly louder than the song.

Doing this along the entirety of the audio track will give you a complete 1-1 beat pattern over the whole round. EASY!!!

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Onto making beats like double time/ 123-123 etc:

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So, Here's an image of my round in it's current state of 1-1 beats throughout:

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The Blue areas have a 1-1 beat pattern which I copied+pasted from the first 8 beats I placed. I place 8 copy those to make 16, copy those 16 and paste to make 32 and so on... saves a ton of time.
The yellow area is a section of the chosen song where the beat plays at half the speed of the rest of the song. so I havent bothered pasting it there yet.
The red areas are areas where there are no beats within the music. Sometimes I leave these empty for rest periods or I add in build up beats or slower 1-1 beats just so the player isn't idle for too long.

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Now that you have the 1-1 beats in place, making your varied beat patterns (1-2-123 / 123-123, and so on) is SUPER easy.
Here we have the section of the song with a slower beat than normal. All i need to do to set this beat up is paste the 1-1 beat pattern like I have done for the rest of the song and then delete every other beat like so:

First image is the copied beats at the regular 1-1 pattern:

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Second image is the newly made half speed 1-1 beat pattern to match the song:

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EASY PEASY!!!!

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Double time is also just as easy:
Here is the section just after that half speed one we just made, its right at the end of the song, so why not make it a double-time section to make it difficult eh? This highlighted section is what we will make double speed, once we have is selected like in the image, im gonna hit CTRL+C to add it to the clipboard:

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What we need to do next is find the mid point between each of the already placed beats. On nearly all the song I've chosen this is really easy to find as there is almost always a distinguishable wave in the audio. If not, work out the timing between the 1-1 beats on the bar at the top of the window and use that.

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Once you have that sweet spot all you need to do is line up the cue on the track (the thick vertical line in some of the screenshots) and paste them beats in:

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Double check your beats are aligned as before and WOOOP you just double-timed it!

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Now other patterns. For all other patterns I combine both the half speed and double-time techniques. (techniques lol...???)
SO....
I set up a section of the song to be double time as we did before:

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Now that we have this in place, all we have to do is remove the extra beats to make the beat pattern we want.

If I want to make a 123-123 beat, I remove 1 beat out of every 4:

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It's that simple!

With the double time beats in place making other beat patterns is really easy. Here's '12-12' and '1-2-123':

12-12 is made by removing the last 2 beats out of every 4:

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1-2-123 is made by removing the 2nd, 4th and 8th beat out of every block of 8:

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HEY PRESTO!!!!!

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This is all done before I add any videos to the Sony Vegas Project. Once I have done this for the whole song and I am happy with the beats, I then mute the audio track and use Vegas to render just the beats into a single audio file. I then put this newly made .mp3 back into the project and align it with the video track. This prevents me from accidentally deleting a beat somewhere while cutting the video files together. This .mp3 also serves as my audio file to create the beat meter in Adobe After Effects:

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PHEW!!!! LONGEST POST I'VE EVER WRITTEN LOL!!!

I hope that was of some help to anyone lol. If you have any other questions or there is anything that is unclear please feel free to ask

I'm gonna go lie down and cry lol....