Another dumb Question

[flvideo]

I am building Collage of Stills and Video. Putting stills between the video clips. I am trying to put music over the stills, the video has its own audio. I have 19 stills between 2 second black scenes That calculates 1:58. I trimmed the music to 1:58 and it runs over in to the video. I cut it down to 1:40 and it still runs into the video. What am I missing? Every time I change the length I remove it from the music Track. How do you guys figure that? Its strange to me. Thanks Bob...

[jimmeeker]

Hello Bob,

You can trim or position an audio track from either the beginning of the song or the end of the song. Most folks make the mistake of always starting a song at the beginning of a scene and have trouble making the end match the end of a scene. It's
much easier to match songs to video by the trim and position buttons under "Range" than it is to try to figure out the time. If you put transitions in between your stills they are shortening all your times up so your estimate of the needed song length will always be too long. Just doing it with the "Range" controls makes it so simple it's scary. It'll save you many headaches as well.

So the easiest way to make the music match your video is to find the real end of the song by clicking on the little speaker icon so that you can see and hear the music as you trim it. Most of the time when you record a song, you have several seconds of space at the beginning and also at the end of the song. So if you have a 3:50 song in the audio window, it's probably actually only about 3:40.of actual music...so trim it off to where you have only music and not dead air time at the beginning and end of the song. ( otherwise you will have false positioning and trimming and you'll wonder why this doesn't work )

Then use the "Position" button that says "END" and move the end of the song to the end of the scene that you want it to match up with......then scroll back to the beginning of the video using the "IN" button under "TRIM" to shorten up the start of the song to match the start of the stills section that you are working on. The secret is to put the end of the song in there first and then trim back the beginning of it to match the start of the scene. ( By certain that you understand the difference between Position and trim and remember to switch buttons when you need to or you will be moving the audio sample to a new position when you meant to trim it)

If you want to have the real beginning of the song and the real end of the song use the same method but start the beginning of the song a second time on an other track below the one you have already done and then cross-fade the audio between the beginning of the song and the shortened version above it.

If you know how to use a "silent sample" to control other tracks or how to use one track to control others it's a simple matter.

if you need help with this concept, I'll try to walk you through it. Let me know if any of this helps.