Everything is okay now

I came into school for one day over the holiday and managed to re edit my entire production. All of the clips were still in the same place, however I was unable to line the music up with the clips perfectly which led me to editing the clips anyway. I then re edited Jack's voice back in the same as I had done before. I was able to edit his voice in somewhat faster than the first time as I now knew what I was doing, and was familiar with the process.

I immediately uploaded it to Vimeo to ensure that I have a version of it published where it can no longer be interfered with. I will embed the video below. It is the final version of my music video, though there are some things I would like to have changed, they would've required re filming which was not an potion without finding new actors.

It's the Final (Cut) countdown

As it turns out my latest version never uploaded to Vimeo, leaving me with an old version of my video. I still have evidence on my blog in previous posts showing that I edited Jack singing the song however I no longer have that version of the video. The latest backup is the version which is currently on Vimeo, there were some editing tweaks made after that, and mainly the singing and instrumental version of the song to remove Carly's voice and replace it with Jack's.

Final straw with Final Cut

I have experienced numerous issues with Final Cut which are solely down to the program or the Mac I am using being glitchy. The most common is un rendered footage/ audio in the editing timeline. This is a big problem with editing because I need to be able to see which clip I am editing to make it as accurate as possible.

In the past I have been able to fix it by moving to the unloaded clip and clicking on it, then waiting for it to buffer. However I did experience a large section of Jack's vocals being missing, even after I had closed and re opened the program multiple times.

As you can see in the image the audio appears to end, however it is still there as I could hear it when I played it. Although I knew it was there, I needed to be able to see the sound waves to be able to edit accurately. Eventually I managed to get it back by zooming all the way in on the footage, then by zooming back out again. I have no idea what caused this, perhaps the size of the file had caused the program to slow down.

More editing of vocals

As I have said in an earlier post the timing of the song I have used is not the same speed as the version Jack sang to, therefore I have had to edit Jack's singing in chunks speeding some sections up and slowing some down. I have cut in between certain lines and spaced them apart to replicate the song as well as I could.

Although I am doing a parody, I still want it to resemble the original where I deem necessary, and I think the more accurate the vocals are to the original the better. I feel tat having the timings off would just make the piece look lazy and unprofessional on my behalf.

Editing Jack's singing

I asked Jack to sing the song so I could replace Carly Rae's voice with his. Unfortunately Jack's singing talent isn't as good as I had hoped. He had the confidence to do so which made him a good candidate, however I would have preferred someone who could've produced a somewhat nicer to listen to version. Sorry Jack.

I did ask someone I know called Toby Watts who has performed in several drama productions, including the production of Grease at my school. He is a good singer, however he was unavailable when I needed him. Furthermore I wasn't sure if having someone looking dorky would go well with a talented singing voice. Conclusively I decided Jack singing as well as he could would be a good fit.

The downside of this is that the acting he did, and the editing I had done prior to recording his voice, was all synced with the original track. Regardless of Jack's voice not being that of an angel, he also wasn't able to exactly reproduce the song with all the perfect timings, not that I expected him to. In addition, the instrumental version I had downloaded was not the same length as the original, meaning it was slightly out of time. This led to a large task of re editing all of the audio for the video to line up with the footage. Unfortunately I was unable to fix the original lip sync issues with Jack's acting, and if anything they may be slightly worse with Jack's singing as well.

I can't re film now as Jack is unavailable for a time period I would need him for, and I cannot re film with someone else otherwise I would need to re film the entire video which would prevent me from meeting the deadline.

Voiceover

I recorded Jack singing the song on my iPhone using the voice memos app. From this app I was able to email them to myself, open the email on a computer and transfer it to a memory stick. I then transferred it from the memory stick into the mac and uploaded it to final cut pro. Finding a version of the original song without lyrics, an instrumental version, was rather challenging. I eventually managed to find a version on a website as a music video without singing, which I again emailed to myself thinking I could repeat the steps from before.

However it would not allow me to transfer the song from the email to the computer, so I had to take it a few steps further. I downloaded an app on my phone which converted videos into downloads. It took some effort and actually downloading two different apps but I eventually managed to get the song saved to my phone. From there I did the same using a memory stick on the computer and uploaded it to the mac.

I replaced the original video which I had been using to line up the lip sync to Jack, with the instrumental track. I detached the audio and deleted the footage leaving me with just the instrumental soundtrack. I then had to edit all of the audio from Jack's voice to line up with the music and the video.