The completed video made here is
[RELEASE] Beat Hero 0.6 Girl.
When you're starting to work in Reaper, one of the early WTF moments I found was in the way it handles "item" insertion and locking. See:
You need to know how locking works. You will need to know when and how to change the project setting "Timebase for items/envelopes/markers," before and after making tempo map changes after you have placed items onto the timeline. It also involves knowing how to lock multiple items, so that your metronome template moves correctly with the tempo map, but isn't damaged by future edits.
You want to use the "Import an MP3 file into Reaper from The Media Explorer" method of bringing music files into your template, because that is the one that won't move your locked metronome items.
You need to know
how to work with multiple timelines in Resolve. You may find that importing the Reaper markers EDL file into Resolve temporarily freezes Resolve. If Resolve has significant CPU usage, it is not crashing. Working on timelines with many markers can cause lag on Resolve's UI.
Your first try will be something like:
- Create your metronome or click track at default tempo, 120 BPM, saving that as a Reaper template.
- Find the correct BPM of one song with whatever tools you use (web lookup, VirtualDJ, etc.) then practice working with that track in your Reaper template.
- With a music timeline that is tempo mapped, apply the X-Raym scripts to make and then export markers for Resolve.
- Export your Reaper music to WAV if you are making any changes to the music while in Reaper.
- Import the markers onto a timeline with the music, in Resolve.
- Use the markers in Resolve to sequence your video to the music.
I cut this song at a tempo change and needed to move that item forward in time, so now you see it matching beat, but not aligned to the source video, in Resolve.
Same timeline in Reaper.
Use regions to envelope the part of the template to be rendered, because the template should have more click and measure track length than needed.
Region/Marker Manager > Render Matrix
> Render
Render the thing you want to. 48000Hz and 24 bit PCM are selected from Resolve's export defaults. Use different settings if you need to. An example of needing to is that the
Suck Less Fuse plugins for Resolve probably need 16 bit PCM input.
Aside from all the things needed to be learned along the way, that's what will tightly fit your video clips to your music for a PMV.
Cuts from a 20 minute scene in a 1 hour film, telling a story over a 4 minute song.
Cuts normally occur in tempo, but off the measure beat, and usually you want some frames before or after the beat.
After all audio cuts (audio that is from video source, and is going into the final mix,) normalize all clips.
Then set audio keyframes around peaks, if you're doing these adjustments in Resolve's Fairlight.
Audio tracks should be configured for
sidechain ducking on Resolve's Fairlight compressor. The video source's audio tracks are senders, and the music track is a listener. I also set my beats audio tracks as senders when making CH.
You should set Attack, Hold, and Release to their lowest values here, adjust Threshold and Ratio for the least noticeable volume drop that still lets your dialog to be audible enough, then check for needed Release value. This is a whole track setting, so you must compromise. You can use volume keyframes and clip normalization to fix difficult parts.
I often use the track Limiter to create space in the mix for the other tracks. The Limiter needs to be set relative to the Compressor so that the Limiter isn't clipping the graph lower than the Compressor would do.
Render a WAV of only the video audio tracks. Pass that WAV through a voice isolation program. I'm using
vocalremover.org. Put the vocals-only result on a new track, with the same attributes as the originals. Set the original tracks at low volume, and drop the isolation track's volume, to mix them as needed to compensate for any noise added to the audio by the isolation software. You can also add Resolve's FX plugins as needed.
The isolation software might change the timing of its output.
For balancing loudness between the tracks, and verifying that the final mix is not clipping:
To make it a CH you'll start working with beat meter animation. Fuck This Sound is easily reproduced at this point. Animating meters will require Fusion animations, clips rendered to PNG, or similar.
One of the past attempts we made at animating to beat in Resolve was:
E̶a̶s̶y̶ Beat Meters with Davinci Resolve / Fusion, which I found to not work accurately for a linear meter, but I have been using what we learned there for both
Beat Hero and
Cock Hero SIMPle. That got me the ability to do anything like Fuck This Sound, and the bouncing graphic visualization we see on YouTube music channels for EDM, Trap, etc. I used it to modify an opacity value.
In animating linear beat meters to time, we'll be doing with Resolve clips (probably Fusion animation clips) what was done before in Premier and Vegas.
