Using BPM wizard ( Automatic tempo recognition) MEP Pro 2015 plus

papadewey wrote on 1/12/2015, 10:21 AM

I am trying to use a feature on MEP I have not used before. If you right click on a music clip, you can select the BPM wizard. I understand it will try to find a beat in a selected music. But I don't understand how to use the tool to get the video cuts on track 1 to align with the beats of the music track. I thought maybe something would appear on the timeline, when I clicked apply, but I am frustrated to find a solution. The help is confusing.
I have always done this manually, by making the cuts in the video match with the beat of the music by looking at the waveform.

But I was hoping this built in tool could save me some work.
Can you either point me to a tutorial of how to use this wizard, or explain in simple terms how to best use it.
I have used MEP for many years, but never have tryed this wizard.

papadewey

Comments

terrypin wrote on 1/12/2015, 11:10 AM

I've pasted below my reply to papadewey who PM'd me with this query earlier today. So, as you see, I'll be interested to learn how to do it too.

I've also asked MAGIX to reassure us that it's not a known bug, before we waste too much time on it.

Hi,

A good question, and I only wish I could help you.

I'd never used that feature but tried it just now in MEP 2014 (with a slow-beat oldie by the Dream Weavers called 'It's Almost Tomorrow') in tracks 1 and 2. I was spectacularly unsuccessful.

For a start, I found the Help obscure. So for this trial I accepted the defaults. Happily, the generated 'beats' appeared to occur at appropriate points to me. The displayed BPM was 82.9 (which puzzled me as I'd expect a whole number). Anyway, I finally clicked Apply, expecting to find marks in the video, so that I could then proceed to edit as necessary.

But what I actually got was nothing - no marks in either video or audio, no message, zilch!

--------------------

What I'd suggest is that you re-post your question in the Forum or Q&A. I'd have suggested that even if I was confident of my own solution, because that way other users can both contribute and learn. Neither are possible via PMs.

I hope that, amongst others, my friends John EB and John CB might be familiar with that feature and able to offer practical help.

BTW, I assume you've studied the Help topic 'Checking the automatic tempo recognition', which is the first item found with a Search target of bpm?

I also found this in the MEP 2014 PDF manual (page 212),
Musical cut adjustment
Behind this option for audio object is an option to "control" video objects by music.
This way, you can synchronize image sequences with music to, for example, produce
video clips.
• Requisite for this is that as many as possible different video objects lie in track 1,
separated by "hard cuts", without any special transition effects. To prepare, first
create a material track with various video clips that should be combined into one
video clip.
• Load a fitting song and select "adjust edit according to music" from the context
menu.
• Now, the song's audio object already has beat information. Normally, this will not
be the case.
• You will then be asked, if the Beat Recognition Assistant should be opened. Click
on "Open Assistant".

However, that confused me further, as I can find no such context menu item. And it also crystallised my view that the whole topic is so complex and/or poorly documented that I'll continue to edit my music tracks manually!

browj2 wrote on 1/13/2015, 10:36 AM

Hi,

The Remix agent creates audio objects that are 1 bar long from whatever beat that you put in. Don't worry about the BPM unless you see that the automatic beat recognition is incorrect. You may have to tap the beat to get the beat markers at the right place. You can move them and I think that you can adjust them if the beat changes (I haven't tried this). The audio objects created are grouped together but can be ungrouped, best to leave them grouped.

When you start, the video clips/images should be on the first track, the audio below it. The clips/images should be set to approximately the desired length before running the Remix agent.

When you apply, the program quantizes the images, meaning that it moves the beginning to correspond to an audio object, and trims the ending to correspond to an audio image. That is, the image snaps to the beginning of an audio object. The ending or length will be trimmed, as far as I know, and not extended, to the nearest audio object to the left of the end of the clip/image.

Note that there is help at the bottom of the Remix agent screen. Check the parameters to make sure that you are not just saving the beat information. This is probably where you went wrong. Near the top, there are radio buttons to select an Action. Use "Create remix object." By default, mine was set to "Save tempo and bar info" which does not create the objects.

See the images below:

Close up showing audio images:

I did this example in VPX6, and I am assuming that it also works properly in MEP.

papadewey wrote on 1/13/2015, 11:06 AM

John C.B.

Thank you for the information and the examples. I found that I was not picking the right radio button as you suggested. Once I picked the correct one, I saw that you could either have the clips match the music beats or you could have the audio object broken into segments that you can manually adjust the video clips to.

Thanks to all for helping me solve this mystery, I am sure it will be helpful.

Papadewey

terrypin wrote on 1/13/2015, 11:56 AM

Thanks John - thought you'd be on top of this audio stuff!

terrypin wrote on 1/14/2015, 10:03 AM

I also had this helpful reply from Magix Support::

I suppose in the context of Movie Edit Pro, the BPM Wizard would only be useful if you pick the "Create remix objects" option in the last step of wizard's dialogue. This would then actually chop up the audio object into many objects (with a cut at each bar), and those object borders could then serve as the markers you were looking for to take into consideration in the editing. You could also use it to purely measure the tempo of a song in BPM. This might or might not be useful for some video editing use cases. Mostly, you should consider the BPM Wizard a transplant from Music Maker, where it generally has more use cases. Then, of course, there's the issue that this feature has its technical limitations when it comes to the correct detection of tempo and bars, especially with certain source materials and if the manual intervention features are not take advantage of properly. But that's a completely different story, I suppose...