Managing Digital Music.

How to select, time, process and transition music in your videos.

By now it's old news that digital audio offers editors power and flexibility that were once available only in the medium of film; and maybe the easiest way to flex all that muscle is with music. While it's important to reinforce the video stream with well-chosen music selections, here we'll focus on how to manage all the music that you've picked.

Starting with the assumption that your show includes more than one piece of music, we'll show how to choose different selections for mix-and-matching, how to time music to picture, how to optimize tracks for underscoring, and how to make smooth transitions from one piece to the next. And while you're browsing in this musical bazaar, check out our exciting grab bag of music editing tips.

Selecting

This is not about how to choose music in general, but how to select two selections that play back-to-back (or at least in close proximity). Basically, you have two choices: similar music styles or contrasting ones, and of these both options have pros and cons.

Similar A and B music tracks are hard to cross-fade satisfactorily, and when you try to butt them together they tend to sound awful. But if your program has an overall consistency of subject and tone (like a family picnic or a garden show) you may want to preserve that uniformity in your music. To solve the mixing problem, use fade out/fade in transitions, with at least a few no-music seconds in the middle.

Two quite different musical tracks are much easier to cross fade and they work well when the tone of the video changes (say, from languorous beach to jumping nightlife). Trouble is, they sometimes sound as if they belong in entirely different programs. Here, the trick is to conform the audio characteristics of the tracks (as distinct from musical ones) for better consistency. More on this in just a moment.