Music 1770: Intro to Music Technology

Working with movies in Logic

Open movie (option-⌘-O)

Movie file location

Logic will look for the movie file wherever it was when you first linked it.

In order for the movie to be automatically found when you transfer a project to Teams or anywhere, start by putting the movie file and your Logic project file within a single enveloping folder.

Show/Hide movie thumbnails in Arrange window

via Global tracks > Movie or ⌘-shift-O

Show/Hide movie in Inspector

Double-click on the floating movie window, or click the red closure circle, to collapse the movie to the Inspector window.

NOTE: This is not working for me on the Logic installation in the lab, but it is not a critical feature.

Display clock (reel) time

Preferences (Settings) > Display > Display Time As: SMPTE/EBU Without Subframes

Click arrow to the right of the “LCD” display: select Beats & Time

What is SMPTE?

Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers

Displays as hour : minutes : seconds : frames

Note that in SMPTE code, the beginning (movie start point) is 01 hours, not 00 hours. Various reasons are given for this practice, all having to do with physical media (film/tape):

  1. Film reels do not typically have enough film for a feature-length movie, so a movie consisted of multiple film reels. The first place in the code originally referred to the reel number.
  2. It is impossible to start at the very beginning of a film loaded on a reel, since some amount of film (leader) must be used to begin the winding process. So the film’s zero point is unplayable.
  3. Film traditionally begins with a pre-roll or lead-in (countdown) to allow synchronization of soundtrack or live elements. SMPTE may also be used for live show sync, whether or not film is a component.
  4. Some digital tape machines glitch when passing through timepoint zero (00:00:00:00).

Scene markers

To create a marker:

Select the Marker track in the Global Tracks area

Click the + sign to the right of the Marker track to create a marker at the playhead or option-' (apostrophe)

The above create a marker at precise playhead point.
(There are other ways to create markers, but they will round to the nearest beat.)

Regular vs. scene markers

Regular markers are synched to MIDI clock (measures/beats)

Scene markers are synched to reel (clock) time

You can only create regular markers; they must be converted to scene markers in the Marker list:

Beat mapping

Beat mapping is a tool that allows you so synchronize specific moments in clock time (i.e. specific events in your video) to a particular location in the beat ruler. What this does is instruct Logic to create the appropriate tempo change prior to (to the left of) the event you are synchronizing.

To create a beat map

Beat mapping is also used to create a beat clock that synchronizes with a pre-existing audio track or sample, so that new tracks can be added in proper time using the metronome and quantized as desired.

Creating a beat map with Automatic Beat Mapping

If you have a preexisting audio or MIDI track (not the case for this project!) Logic can create a beat map based on this track. However, this only works with clean tracks that have a well-defined and sufficiently obvious/percussive beat. (This is one area where your ears are still better than the computer!)

Still, you can use automatic beat mapping to make a tempo guide for your video by recording your own beats (i.e. tapping out a track via audio or MIDI recording) and then using the resulting track to create the map.

I will demo this in class Thursday. Note: this exact process is not described anywhere in the Logic documentation!

Download this demo file

Exporting your Logic sound to a new video file

File > Movie > Export Audio to Movie...

Give the new video file a new name, one that makes clear this file is the one with your own soundtrack.

If your original movie file has a soundtrack (or soundtracks—some video formats allow for multiple sound layers, such as a music and a dialog track, or different dialog tracks in different languages), those will appear in the following dialog box, which asks you which tracks you want to include (keep) in your new file. You want all of them to be disabled, otherwise your new music will be layered over the pre-existing theme song you are trying to replace.

Reference

Refer to these sections of the complete Logic manual:

Work with markers pp. 742-53
Note: “Markers” are not the same as “Arrangement markers”. Make sure you’re reading the correct section.

Work with beat mapping pp. 801-6
To get to know beat mapping, you need to read only the first part (pp. 801-2); read on if you’re interested in creating beat maps from audio tracks.

Use movie scene markers pp. 1007-9
Note: Scene markers and regular markers that are “locked” behave the same way: they are both locked to absolute time positions, as opposed to beat ruler positions. The only real difference is that you cannot unlock a scene marker.