Cuttin' to the Beat

With no actual formal training I tend to question many of the things that I do. So I was just viewing a wedding film of someone else's and it brought me to think that I cut everything to the beat of whatever music I have for my films. I just absolutely can't bring myself not to. I have viewed many films including the one I just watched that many parts are not cut to the beat. Yet the film did flow just fine...it was beautiful actually...yet it gets on my nerves sometimes when i see something not synced.

Discuss...

There is also a "back beat" in music. That is the count in between the beats. A dominant beat is usually on 1 and 3. You can also cut to the beats of 2 and 4. Then there are the divisions in between. You are always cutting to the timing of the music.

It is like cutting to dialog. You don't cut between actors simply because one stopped talking and the other started. There is much more to consider.

Does the emotional content and timing of the cut correlate to the emotional content and timing of the music?

Also, there is the phenomenon that certain music compositions lend themselves to random visuals with no timing. Much as old screen savers used do seem to be in sync with music playing, although nothing mechanically was syncing them in any way.

Editing to music is simply editing to a language other than English or Spanish or Choctaw. The more you can learn about the language (music theory), the better you'll edit to it.

I'm no pro editor, nor a musician. I do have a good feeling, if a cut hits or miss a beat. But I don't like stubborn oompa-oompa editing just on every bar of the music.

So, I listen to the music in my project and tap markers into it - that isn't just 1-3 or 2-4, but sometimes a more tammm-da-da-da-damm etc ......

And modern dance-music (my son tortured me for a while with a genre called DubStep ... arghgh) makes it easy - apply very short cuts = fits :woohoo:

I'm more a fan of relaxing music, classic, jazz .... apply 2sec dissolve = niiiice.-


■ karsten

There is also a "back beat" in music.

I agree with Ben.

I remember way back, lets just say under the influences dancing between the beats.

Let me put it like this.

Imagine that you are a basket ball player.

You bounce your ball to the beat.

And whilst you are waiting for the rebound you snake around it!

You can even swing your leg above/below the ball etc...

Try cutting something badly on purpose.

Seriously. It is really interesting. I did this once with a guy channel hopping.

Then try the basket ball/snake analogy

I know there are many beats to music...I am a musician. I'm just saying that this particular film was chopped hee and there but yet still flowed. I will be experimenting for sure. Not like I don't cut on the inbetweens and such. Usually with the obvious though I guess. i dunno.

I usually mark the music clip and the upper video clips with general markers that match the basic beat for reference. I find myself deleting many of those and repositioning throughout the editing process. My final review is always a visual while listening carefully to the music, and it's true that not all cuts are best made on the absolute timed beat of the music. Especially, depending on the tempo, you may find a cut just slightly before or after a common beat projects your image better. If the cuts looks great with the accompanying music, that's how I leave it. I don't force them to be specifically timed unless that visually looks better to me.

If you can take the cut off the beat and put the action on the beat you can keep the general pace of the video with the beat while hiding the cuts.

Doing this with the occasional cut (cut sequence) on the beat can work well.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Walter Murch's In the Blink of an Eye.

I think it should be required reading for editors. It's $10 on Amazon.

In the Blink of an Eye is celebrated film editor Walter Murch's vivid, multifaceted, thought -- provoking essay on film editing. Starting with what might be the most basic editing question -- Why do cuts work? -- Murch treats the reader to a wonderful ride through the aesthetics and practical concerns of cutting film. Along the way, he offers his unique insights on such subjects as continuity and discontinuity in editing, dreaming, and reality; criteria for a good cut; the blink of the eye as an emotional cue; digital editing; and much more. In this second edition, Murch reconsiders and completely revises his popular first edition's lengthy meditation on digital editing (which accounts for a third of the book's pages) in light of the technological changes that have taken place in the six years since its publication.

Half the book is good for beginners, the second half is outdated technical drool. But a very good novice book. It doesn't address editing to music for music videos. That's a different creature. Stand alone music pieces, and dialog in filme are very different things. I'm just saying.

Also, if you can find a copy of Micheal Wohl's "The Craft Of Editing", that is really good, too.

I'm a musician too, and when I first started I also cut in sync with the music. The thing about the music is that it's not just syncing to subdivisions of the tempo, but you can also work with cutting to the emotion of musical piece.

Not all music added to a video will contain emotional inducing sentiments, but when it does, this is something you can work with.

It's also liberating to break free from always syncing to tempo.

Now keep in mind that this isn't an excuse for a video that simply has music slapped on... I think we've all seen those, but it's just something to keep in mind as another option.

Sometimes the cuts just work, sometimes they don't. Editing is an art and while there are lots of rules, there are plenty of times that they should be broken. Explaining why something like this works is like explaining the Mona Lisa smile.

My top three editing books are In the Blink of an Eye which is just a great generalization of the art, but the rule of six is what you should really take from that book.

The next book is "On Film Editing" by Edward Dmytryk who was a blacklisted film maker. There is a lot of really good theory in this book. Edward also has a pretty similar rule of six.

The final book is "The Technique of Film & Video Editing" by Ken Dancyger. This is a textbook and covers almost everything you could want to know as an editor, but it's not boring and tedious like a textbook. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to learn more.