Multiple Tempos for Video Score

[beatbell]

I cant seem to figure this out. I started scoring for a video about halfway through the video, mainly because that would be the piece of music I would base everything else around. I imagine i'm not the first to do this. Anyways, now that I have finished recording the music for that section of the video I obviously now want to start with everything else. To do this I need to change the tempo again, so the music will fit appropriately. The problem is when I add a tempo change before my last tempo change, everything I previously recorded does not sync up with the video, its all pushed back and does not hit the que points of the video.

How do I get it so everything I recorded starts where its suppose to start while having multiple tempo changes? I understand that changing the tempo will increase or decrease the amount of time between beats, and thats why when I change it moves everything around on me, but there must be a solution for this! Can I somehow lock things to the ruler? So they don't move around when I change the tempo?

[nst7]

I don't know the answer to this, but I think you will have a much easier time if you just create a new session for each Cue (place where you need music), each with it's own tempo.

Then when you're done, print your VI's to audio in each session and then import all of them into your master session.

[beatbell]

K so I found out the answer, and the answer is there is no answer. HOWEVER after picking around for a few hours I did find a perfect solution. At first I thought "Time Locking" everything was going to work, and it did for the audio tracks, but for the MIDI tracks they still moved off there initial position of the video, because they are locked to the grid. Thats an easy solution though. Just select all the MIDI clips and slide them to where they are supposed to be. However, for some stupid reason, tempo change markers are not Locked to the timeline. Meaning they are also pushed or pulled when ever you make a tempo change before them.

Here is the solution. Make an "Absolute" marker (just your basic marker for text) directly where the Tempo Change marker is, before you make another tempo change. That way, even though your tempo marker doesn't stay locked to the timeline, you can just line it back up with the absolute marker, which does stay locked to the timeline.

Not an easy solution but it defiantly works.

[reichman]

There are a lot of solutions actually. You should learn how to set all of your MIDI tracks to sample-base instead of tick-base. This will keep them locked to the absolute time, freeing you to change the tempo map.

Also, high-end scoring composers often make "elbows" in the tempo map which is an additional tempo change or two over silence that is used as an adjustment to make another cue land in the right place. For example, 11 bars at 312bpm, before a change to a more sane tempo 2 bars before the downbeat of the cue.

Making separate sessions for each cue saves some headaches at the beginning, but causes many headaches toward the end when recording musicians and mixing. Choose carefully.

[beatbell]

Oh I see. So basically create a very high BPM right before a Cue Tempo change so it 'uses up' a bunch of bars? Thanks.

[Dizzi45Z]

I've been in this situation several times before. It would be sweet if there was a way to be able to quickly add or delete measures that end up in "Elbows" The "Elbow makes sense if you have extra measures, but what about when you need more measures? Perhaps PT could have put that in the "insert time" "cut time" dialogues. Something that deletes the measures and creates a new tempo change that makes up for the missing measures without moving any regions in the Edit Window.

I know there are ways to do this, but it requires one to be a rocket scientist. I have fixed areas like this before, but I had a headache by the time I figured it out.

[scottgreiner]

This is the kind of thing that computers are supposed to do for you, thus eliminating headaches! I've talked with Digi about this very issue before, but they seem to think it's not important. Digital performer used to have (maybe still does) something called "chunks", which we're sort of like nested sequences, each with it's own tempo map, that could be scooted around the timeline.

Sure wish Avid would do something like this. Would make scoring SOOOO much easier. Midi recording during pre-roll with quick-punch enabled would be great too (like audio does in quick-punch), so you can catch grace notes that happen before the record downbeat.

[Dizzi45Z]

Originally Posted by scottgreiner

Midi recording during pre-roll with quick-punch enabled would be great too (like audio does in quick-punch), so you can catch grace notes that happen before the record downbeat.

+1000000000 on that.

I have thought that soo many times. In fact, I wish a lot of MIDI clip behaviors were the same as Audio behaviors. Such as control click drag audio regions in the Edit window and the region maintains it's time as you go between tracks. Try that with a MIDI track and it annoyingly switches the view to notes view and gives you the pencil tool to start drawing in notes. Like when is somebody honestly going to draw notes into a MIDI clip like that?

[matthias.matthias]

Originally Posted by scottgreiner

Digital performer used to have (maybe still does) something called "chunks", ... Sure wish Avid would do something like this. Would make scoring SOOOO much easier.

+ 1 Something like that would be awesome!!!

Originally Posted by Dizzi45Z

In fact, I wish a lot of MIDI clip behaviors were the same as Audio behaviors.

+1 E.g.: What about a playlist view for midi tracks?