Edit Suite: Editing Picture to Sound (page 2)

After narration, the other great audio organizer for your video is music. In fact, it's obvious that music can determine the overall feeling that your program delivers.

In choosing music, style and mood are always the first considerations. You don't want a Bach fugue for a skateboard montage (Hmm: or do you?) and the pounding energy of rap doesn't seem to fit a picnic by the river. Once you've chosen the score for a sequence, its character will influence the style and pace of the editing.

Music is especially useful for setting the length of shots that lack internal timing. If you need to show someone walking from X to Y, then the shot length is built in: it lasts from X to Y. By contrast, a flower closeup just sits there, providing no clue as to how long you should leave it on screen.

That's where music can help you make good edits. By timing the images to musical phrases, you can turn a random bunch of flower shots into a pleasing passage. (Since we can't play music on a magazine page, imagine that the little verse in Figure 6 is a melody instead, with each musical beat in bold letters.)

In Figure 6, each image lasts for exactly one phrase of music. This is a useful technique when you want a relentless, driving feel. At other times, it helps to vary the shot length by cutting on beats within phrases, like this (this time just imagine the flower closeups):

1. See the endless Summer flowers
2. Nodding on our TV screens.
3. Do their
4. Shots go
5. On for hours
6. Or is that just the way it seems?

Timed by musical beats, the shot lengths are now 4-4-1-1-2-4. By breaking the strict symmetry of phrases, you can achieve a more organic and natural effect.

In these examples, the shots are cut on the musical beat, so that each one starts with an accent. Alternatively, you can achieve an even more complex rhythm by cutting "off the beat," like this:

1. See the endless Sum
2. mer flowers Nod
3. ding on our T
4. V screens.

Be careful, though: cutting off the beat means timing exactly half-way between accents. Making edits anywhere else will destroy the rhythm. Incidentally, if you edit digitally, you can display the pattern of your music as a visual wave form, with spikes indicating the accent points. That makes it much easier to drag your shots around the editing time line to fit the rhythm of the track.

To sum up quickly: narration's a great way to organize and sequence visual material and music provides easy patterns for timing your edits. By selecting words and music creatively and then laying picture to track, you can make an engrossing video on almost any topic--even the Salmonella County Garden Show.

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