 Hi guys, this is Jason here from Nathaniel. In this lesson we are basically going to address a problem which most musicians face especially these days with the pandemic situation. You have to kind of do most of your work from home and on your own because especially in India no one really meets each other these days because of the situation. So inevitably musicians have to manage audio, we have to figure out how to record our stuff in our bedrooms or in our so-called little home studios as what I have as well and also inevitably we have to handle video. So video is something which is obviously a very deep subject and I am nowhere close to be able to explaining anything about video and how to shoot it and how to color correct it and whatnot but here's a tip and I think something which all musicians need to learn in order to sort of survive in today's day and age because you're creating all your content from home or in your home setup or in your home space and all music ultimately needs to be seen by people be it on Instagram, be it on YouTube or some release platform these days you have to tag your audio content with your video content. So the standard problem we face as musicians at least for me the biggest problem which I face is syncing and that's something you can see really clearly because as a musician you kind of know when some you at least know when that element of video is messed up you know because you see yourself playing a chord on the guitar and it just doesn't look good when it sounds the way you want it to sound. So syncing is something I'm going to address in this lesson and I'm going to show you a couple of softwares which I use and hopefully you can take something out of it and I'm trying to make it as scalable as possible so the softwares I'm using could be you know for both Mac and Windows so it depends on what you use and I'll just explain the workflow right now. Right now is I'm a piano player so I make these things called riffs which are short pieces of music as you can see this is the audio of the riff all this stuff is the audio and then I have collaborated with a musician friend who in this instance is playing the flute so this musician would have played the flute over some of these riffs and then we have a few videos so this is my top angle video as you can see very average video recording is just done using a simple iPhone iPhone 7 or something which is an old one and then we just use a screen grabbing software and since I'm a teacher I want to record my screen where I have this midi app called Caughty where I kind of capture that and then show it from the point of view of teaching so I have a screen capture angle which I use with my midi notes if you will then I have a top angle and I could have had a face angle but you know it was tough so I just stuck with the top angle and the other reason being we have a flute angle which is again done with Arjun's setup which is again a simple phone setup but if you observe the sound of each audio from each video capture source is very different isn't it this has a metronome and if you can hear this there's a lot of me talking there's very less of the piano you can barely hear it and there's a lot of my finger noise while in Arjun's flute recording there's a lot of metronome so this is what he is using to either record the video or record the audio or maybe both maybe he's doing it at the same time or maybe he's shooting the video after he's finished piecing the audio so that is subjective that's how you would like to go about the process so just to recap I have the screen capture angle I have the top piano angle and I have the flute angle wherever need be and then finally my department or the musicians department is of course audio where we try to be as professional as possible so as you can hear you'll find a track so this has been produced mixed engineered mastered as best as we can because as musicians that's something you know so this video as I said earlier is about syncing so our goal is to sync all of this together and a very important thing for me is being a musician I don't want to spend any time figuring out how to sync how to drag stuff in and out and you know those sort of things so I wanted an app which does this really well for me and I currently use this thing called Pluralize 4 by the company Red Giant and we leave a link in the description you can check it out so I've just found this app it works really well for me and I've compared it with the default versions you know of Final Cut Pro Final Cut Pro has a sync feature which to be honest doesn't work for music it's really bad with music I've had horrible results you may argue frame rate set this set that but I mean it just doesn't work you know and as musicians we don't want to get into the video department too much so this is a software which really works and if you're a musician who uses maybe one DSLR camera because you can't afford a big rig and you have one a cell phone maybe a couple of cell phones and that's how you want to shoot you want to collaborate with friends or you want to do like a virtual choir thing you know that seems to be going on very often these days with the everyone's at home you know so you get all the footage together so this is a lot of clips this is the audio and then you drag it into Pluralize it does its thing it says preparing media to synchronize does that really fast and it says 16 clips ready to synchronize and here's where the magic happens right you hit the sync button and I'll just show you what it's doing takes as you can see not too much time rather it's crazy time you see what it's doing it's created some sort of tracks as I call it from an audio background and then it kind of identifies what is what so if you just hit this media button you'll see that this is the screen capture thing video this is my top piano angle this is the flute angle right and it has all been synced with each other and this is my audio my main audio which doesn't have a video so it has synced everything either to this or to each other I have no idea about the process you'll have to go to the you know when you if you want you can research that but all I know is when this goes blue when everything is blue it means everything is synced and it says 16 out of 16 clips are synchronized so that's a great feeling for me because I know it's going that would have saved me a long long time and like I said if I had to move this into FCP or Final Cut Pro or any of these other softwares out there it either takes a hell of a lot of time to sync or else the sync is horribly inaccurate to a point that it just does something it creates a synchronized clip or something and you waste all that time all that hard disk space and then it's all it all sucks right doesn't work so this is a software which works really well and they haven't even upgraded it for a few years they're very happy with the way it works I guess it's been on version 4 for a while now so what's cool is you then export timeline and you can you know save to file you can name the file I am just going to call it something May 22nd riffs so this is creating an FCP XML file that means you can load this into Final Cut Pro so this thing is actually even creating a project for you right you don't have to make new project you don't have to do all that stuff and if you choose export format here you can choose Final Cut Pro X you can choose other famous video recording video editing softwares like Premiere Pro Da Vinci or you can even render individual video files which is also cool so it'll render it file by file synced with the original source wave audio so if ever you want to do that and then work on it or send it to someone else who's a professional video editor like like I do sometimes you could right now I'm doing this edit on my own so Final Cut Pro X I want to name it something so let me name it May 22nd again because it is May 22nd when we're shooting this and you tick this button import automatically into FCP X of course FCP which is Final Cut Pro should be running at the time obviously and then you hit export and even more magic seems to happen there's a nice beep there you can create a new what do you call it whatever library as it's called in Final Cut it's 22nd May 2021 naming it by date and then it all comes in right and you double click and here you go so just to show you it's going to move all this out of the timeline lift from timeline I guess they call it and let me go to a place where Arjun has played and all of us have played this so this is the main audio okay and you see it's made the tracks in FCP part by part so if I just mute everything hitting the V key let's see how the flute lines up see even the metronomes lining lines up quite well so let's bring the flute later let's try the the screen grab angle so it sounds a bit weird right it sounds like there's a lag but if I mute this audio it's perfect I mean it can't get better than that and then if I go the top angle right let me try and rotate this top angle by 90 degrees so that you can see some of it again apologies for my shabby video editing skills I'm just using a basic iPhone with a top angle there we go it's perfect it's like really perfect I mean I just wish it could have been shot better so maybe I need to learn more of video shooting you know but nevertheless it gets the job done I can now give this out to anyone I can render it myself I can do a little bit of color a little bit of you know angle checking and you know basic stuff here and there and I can render this stuff out so let's also assume maybe you don't have you know a software like pluralize to do the job for you I'm going to let's try and sync even manually and see if manual syncing is possible so I'm just going to delete Arjun's flute video or and I'll delete his video here also and try to import it so even if you do not have a software like pluralize there's a simple trick which we could follow you know to sync manually even if you don't have a you know this is a paid software it costs a little bit of money so if you do not have the budget for this you can even do it manually you import all your clips into the project and now I'm just going to work with only the flute let's say the flute has not yet been imported so I need this to come somewhere here and I need this to come somewhere here now clearly by dragging and dropping it's not going to magically be in sync so here's what I do I figure out where he's going to start playing and here's where our knowledge of being musicians helps and recording on click counting ability to feel the pulse you know so if I play this back I know where Arjun's coming not here little fast forward so one two three four bang so that's my one of the bar where he enters right so I've put a marker there in fcp you hit m I guess in most video software as m will make you like a marker so you see what it did there right it creates a point there we go so I put up m a point there and what's nice about it is this timeline you see it magnetically locks to that marker which is really cool and for that you need to turn snapping on which in fcp is here and you hit n to snap to to enable that or disable that now here's the trick you don't need a syncing software now you can mute this for a quick moment figure out when the one of the bar is when the flottis enters one two three go one so I've got the two ones together what do I do just drag it and see how they lock the markers will just interlock with each other then I just mute that audio because it's I know it's going to be fairly in sync bring back the original audio I'm hitting V to bring it to hide the hide the video or audio and bring back or show or hear the audio in this case hopefully things are in sync now looks fairly in sync in fact if I open the audio little bit you can obviously move it or fine tune it a little bit using the comma key you see it moves a little or the point key or the full stop key right guys so this is basically how we sync so in conclusion you take this app pluralize you keep it opened check it out try it out and see if it works for you and this will be really helpful imagine if this is audio coming from like a million people you know you want to do a virtual choir with 60 70 voices and you want to put that fancy you know many videos in one kind of a thing the the creativity with video editing will be where you place everything I guess how you you know creatively put your you know your color grading and those sort of things so hopefully this video will help you save the time to actually focus on the creative part syncing and the technical stuff trust me as you can see right now was just a click away you just took all these clips put it in here and it works now an inbuilt video editing software like Final Cut Pro may also have syncing capabilities but then you have to import everything into this and then select everything sync it one by one to each clip and then it creates a synchronized clip and nine out of ten times with the work I do it's a complete failure so I would not recommend the video software's inbuilt syncing either you use something like a pluralize which is paid but it's a one-time investment and it really works I've just showed you right now in this lesson everything was pretty much live you saw the speed at which it does it and then the icing on the cake is you can send it to FCP with a project and everything's named and aligned well and what not I mean all you have to do now is do your edit and render right so this will also help when you're working with lot of material like in my case I had I did ten riffs this is ten pieces of music and I'm working with all the videos and audios for all ten in one FCP timeline which I think that's the way I work so it helps I don't have to keep finding new projects and whatever else when I'm done with this I'll just back it up or delete it upload it to YouTube and once it's uploaded job done maybe back it up on the cloud somewhere right guys again this is Jason from Nathaniel hope you found the lesson useful and if you have do not forget to subscribe to our channel like the video share the video leave a comment with something else you'd like to learn I know this is a primarily a music theory slash piano bass guitar kind of channel but this is something musicians in today's world will need to learn and I would highly encourage you to do it you can share your music with a lot more people you know by learning a little bit of video and syncing and also collaborate with a lot more people whose sole job from their end will be just to record the data from their house and give it to you you don't have to tell them how should you record it they record it however they want and give it to you and these days phones are quite decent I guess so you don't have to worry too much and so on and so forth cheers again catch you in the next one bye