Sunday, December 25, 2016

PE15: Music Remix (NEW), Fitting Music to Movie

INTRODUCTION

In the Premiere Elements Editor workflows audio distortion issues can develop when trying to make an audio video fit by increasing or decreasing the duration of the user personal audio to fit the video. But, Adobe did include in the program free special soundtracks which are based on the concept of changing duration of the music without changing its arrangement. Refer to SmartSound (Premiere Elements 11 and earlier) and Music Score (Premiere Elements 12 and later).

The free Adobe Music Scores feature continue to exist in Premiere Elements 15.  In addition to the free Music Scores possibilities, Adobe introduces a Music Remix feature which is aimed at allowing the user to change the user personal music file duration without changing the music arrangement. According to the Adobe document introduction for its Music Remix

The Music Remix feature in Premiere Elements allows you to easily increase or decrease the length of an audio clip to match the desired duration without losing the continuity of the audio content. The Remix tool analyzes your song files, identifying hundreds of loops, transitions, and important segments, and then allows you to quickly remix to any duration.
 
(See HERE for full details). The essentials of this Music Remix include
  • Music Remix on Expert or Quick Workspace Music Track only 
  • Increasing or decreasing of audio file duration with mouse cursor in special configuration (a red bracket facing left/two black arrows facing to right through the center of the bracket)

ISSUE
Note: The Music Remix feature works on music clips and cannot be used on Music Scores (downloaded from Music panel), Instant Movie, smart trim, favorite moment trimming, or Video collage outputs.
 Note: For better results, use audio clips with more instrumentals and less vocals.
The above Notes from the Adobe document on its Music Remix feature caught attention. And, it was decided to explore those Notes further. 

EXPERIMENT

Regarding.....For better results, use audio clips with more instrumentals and less vocals.

Task was to make a fit between
  • Video Track 1 content consisting of 3 minutes and 30 seconds of Christmas video only clips and stills
  • Music Track consisting of one Christmas instrumental/vocal clip with duration 2 minutes and 18 seconds. The arrangement of the song has singer A opening the song alone, then singer B singing alone, then A and B singing together, and then singer B finalizing the song with a grand high note.
If Time Stretch was used to stretch this instrumental/vocal clip from 2 minutes 18 seconds to 3 minutes and 30 seconds, the song played out according to the original arrangement, but the audio was markedly distorted. For the matched video/music duration, Time Stretch showed a Speed % = 65.82%.

If the Music Remix feature was used, the end result
  • Instrumental/vocal file duration that matched that of the video content
  • No sound distortion
  • But, the vocal arrangement of the song was markedly impacted with default settings
Before
Singer A
Singer B
Singer A+B
Singer B finishing on grand high note

After (Music Remix which comes with "Audio Segments" = Longer)
Singer A
Repeat of Singer A
Singer B
Singer A+B
Singer B finishing on grand high note

After (Music Remix, then Music Remix settings for Music Remixed set to the third setting from the left - See Figure 1)
Singer A
Singer B
Singer A+B
with at least 4 repeat of Singer B's grand high note


The results here appeared to be unaffected by wrapper (.m4a, .mp3, or .wav).

COMMENTARY

It is not clear which best describes the possibility from the use of Music Remix applied to the user personal music file with instrumental versus instrumental with vocal- "better results" or "acceptable versus unacceptable results". The Music Remixed file editing via "Audio Segments" in Music Remix Settings dialog does leave open the door for "better results" or "acceptable versus unacceptable results" results.

This was just a quick look at this feature. More on this topic may be featured in future blogs here.
Be sure to review Adobe's Music Remix feature details in the links provided above. Adobe writes
Note: The remixed audio clip present in the Remix folder is the original output from the algorithm and that on the timeline is the Time stretched version to match exact duration.
It is not understood how Adobe's "Time stretched" in the above note bypasses the typical audio distortion of audio when using "Time Stretch". Still thinking about that one.
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ATR