User manual

471
Editing tempo and signature
Matching a musical score to video
Here’s an example of how to use the Time Warp tool in
“musical events follow” mode. Let’s say you are creating
the music for a film. You have a video track, an audio track
with a commentary and some audio and/or MIDI tracks
with your music. Now you want to match the position of a
musical cue to a position in a video film. The musical cue
is located in bar 33. There are no tempo changes in the
project (yet). Proceed as follows:
1. Make sure tempo track mode is selected on the Trans-
port panel.
2. Now you need to locate the position in the video. If you
do not need very high precision, you can simply locate it
looking at the thumbnails on the video track – otherwise
you can pinpoint the exact position and add a marker to
the marker track (that you can snap to later on).
You can also make a note of the exact position and add an extra ruler
track set to show the timecode (Cubase only).
3. Make sure that the correct tracks are set to linear time
base or musical time base, respectively.
In our example, we want the video track and the audio track with a com-
mentary voice-over to be linear time-based (as well as the marker track, if
used). All other tracks should be set to musical time base. You change
this by clicking the time base button in the track list or Inspector.
4. Set up the Grid Type pop-up menu as desired.
When you click with the Time Warp tool, it snaps to the selected grid. In
this case, you will find the musical cue at the start of bar 33, so we can
set the grid to “Bar”.
• Note that this affects the snapping to the ruler (tempo
grid) when you click! In addition, the tool can be “magnetic”
to events in the Project window when you drag – for this,
you need to activate the Snap function, open the Snap
Type pop-up menu, and select “Events”.
In our example, this would be useful if you created a marker at the de-
sired position in the video – when you drag the grid (see below), it will
snap to the marker.
5. Click on the Time Warp button and click again to open
a pop-up menu.
6. Select the “Warp Grid (musical events follow)” mode.
7. Click in the event display at the start of bar 33 and
drag to the desired position in the video.
As mentioned above, this can mean dragging to a position indicated by
the thumbnails on the video track, to a marker on the marker track or to a
time position on an additional ruler track (Cubase only).
When you drag, the ruler is scaled – and the music tracks
will follow.
8. Release the mouse button.
If you look in the ruler at the beginning of the project, you will see that the
first (and only) tempo event has been adjusted.
9. Try playing back.
The musical cue should now happen at the correct position in the video.
Let’s say you need to match another cue to another posi-
tion later on in the video. If you simply repeat this proce-
dure, you will find that the first cue gets out of sync – since
you are still changing the first (and only) tempo event on
the tempo track!
You need to create a “lock point” – a tempo event at the
first cue position:
10. Press [Shift] and click with the Time Warp tool in the
event display at the cue position.
In our case, this is bar 33.
A tempo event (with the same value as the first one) is
added at that position.
Musical time base selected Linear time base selected