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Tips for getting started on syncing text animation to music?

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Oliver Giesen

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Tips for getting started on syncing text animation to music?

PostFri Jul 08, 2016 11:56 pm

Hi there!

[Introduction - skip to next paragraph for my actual question(s)]
I'm pretty much just getting started with Fusion and Resolve. I'm mostly coming from a pure hobbyist background, having some extended experience using Blender as well as various shareware NLEs. I have already created some simple motion graphics in Fusion and now want to move on to a bigger project which is going to be a "Lyrics Video" for a band I play drums for. I had already pretty much completed a first draft of this in Blender but my bandmates didn't really like the 3D style I went for (because that's what I knew how to do). Instead, we're now looking to creating something similar to the videos linked to at the end of this post.

So, essentially I want to animate (2D-)text in sync with music. Here are some questions/roadblocks I ran into so far:
  • Can I somehow load an audio or MIDI file into Fusion in a way that would allow me to (visually) line up keyframes with the waveform or individual MIDI events/notes? I've already found mention of the MIDI Extractor tool but am unclear on whether it could help me with that task and if so, how. Are there any other ways to import some kind of "cue sheet" (containing markers at timecodes) into Fusion?
  • Expanding on the previous question: Can I actually preview(/prehear) this in Fusion for tweaking, i.e. play video and sound in sync? Or would I have to go back and forth between Fusion and Resolve for this?
  • I have at least 70 cues in the lyrics of the song I'm doing (sometimes a whole line will appear at once, sometimes it will be broken up into individual words). What would be the best way to represent this in Fusion? Should each cue be a distinct Text tool or should I only have as many as I need to be visible concurrently (possibly multiplied by the number of different text styles I will be using) and reuse them? Sounds like it would get messy either way... Are there any best practices for this kind of thing?
  • Are there maybe any tutorials out there on how to do either exactly this kind of project or at least something sufficiently similar?
  • Am I getting it all wrong? Is Fusion maybe not the right tool for this job after all?

Cheers,

Oliver

Some examples of the general style I'm aiming for (basically, most of the results you will get when searching YouTube for "Official Lyrics Video"):
(Rolling Stones - Paint it Black)
(Pink! - True Love)
(Hakuna Matata)

These are a little more extreme/elaborate (you might want to mute the sound if you're not into Metal, though ;) ):
(Stuck Mojo - Verbal Combat)
(Onslaught - Chaos is King)
(Exodus - Salt the Wound)
(Exodus - Blood in, Blood out)
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Jules Clark

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Re: Tips for getting started on syncing text animation to mu

PostTue Jul 12, 2016 3:21 am

You can load a sound file in the audio tab of the Saver tool. Then hit F7 to go to timeline view, find the saver tool and there should be a little triangle symbol next to saver name in list of tools. Press that to expand and you should see the left/right audio tracks. Drag along the green audio tracks with mouse and you will be scrubbing the audio - it will give you a frame time at bottom left so you can see the exact frame# of the audio at any given point of duration.

Hope that answers yr question.
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Sander de Regt

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Re: Tips for getting started on syncing text animation to mu

PostTue Jul 12, 2016 9:00 pm

I have at least 70 cues in the lyrics of the song I'm doing (sometimes a whole line will appear at once, sometimes it will be broken up into individual words). What would be the best way to represent this in Fusion? Should each cue be a distinct Text tool or should I only have as many as I need to be visible concurrently (possibly multiplied by the number of different text styles I will be using) and reuse them? Sounds like it would get messy either way... Are there any best practices for this kind of thing


If you have the timing (timecodes) of the lyrics you can also use the text from file modifier.
Make a *.txt file with

0 first line
10
20 second line
30
45 third line

etc

and Fusion will cycle from 'first line' to 'second line' to 'third line' etc based on the number that's in front.
Sander de Regt

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Rumen Belev

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Re: Tips for getting started on syncing text animation to mu

PostSun Jul 17, 2016 8:14 pm

If you have the timing (timecodes) of the lyrics you can also use the text from file modifier.

Can you explain where to locate this file modifier?
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Sander de Regt

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Re: Tips for getting started on syncing text animation to mu

PostMon Jul 18, 2016 10:29 pm

My mistake. I thought it was a built in modifier, but it turns out it's a KKD (Krokodove) one.
So you need Fusion Studio to be able to do it like this.
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Nathan Shirley

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Re: Tips for getting started on syncing text animation to mu

PostTue Jul 28, 2020 6:37 pm

I know this is an old thread, but I'm wondering if there are now better ways to work with syncing to music/audio/MIDI within Fusion.

Is there a way to set keyframes within Resolve and then bring them into Fusion? Is there a way to bring a MIDI file (used to generate the WAV file in a project) into Fusion and set keyframes based on MIDI events? Is there a simple way to view the waveform of the project's audio to set keyframes with in Fusion?
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Sander de Regt

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Re: Tips for getting started on syncing text animation to mu

PostTue Jul 28, 2020 8:14 pm

Go to the we suck less forum at www.steakunderwater.com and search for midi and wav-files. There are a couple of Fuses/tools/scripts/modifiers that can work with midi data and/or wave files to drive animations inside of Fusion.

This is a video where I used a combination of all of these things to almost procedurally create the footage.

Sander de Regt

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Nathan Shirley

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Re: Tips for getting started on syncing text animation to mu

PostTue Jul 28, 2020 8:56 pm

Thanks for the tip, cool to know this stuff can be heavily automated.

For my purposes I would need to make a lot of adjustments to keyframes by hand too, and having the audio track in Fusion to sync to would be so useful... and seems like such a basic necessity for many things. Specifically I mainly just need to keyframe a transform node to sync audio to a scrolling image. I had originally tried it in the edit page of Resolve, but easing in-out wasn't fully working and I was told Fusion was the proper way to do that kind of thing.

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