Audio for Video

[JamPro]

Hello.  The other day, I made a simply iPhone - iPhone 8 -  video of myself playing keys in my studio.  As I listened to the video, I felt the keyboard audio should be louder.  Now, in my studio, the keyboard - Roland RD2000 - is plugged into my mixer, from which I monitor the keyboard with outboard speakers.  The mixer also interfaces with my studio computer, which runs Reaper.  So I can easily record the audio of my keyboard playing in Reaper, while simultaneously recording the visual using my iPhone.

 

So my question is, can I make a video of myself playing the keyboard that includes the recorded keyboard audio?  I believe Reaper has some capacity to sync video to audio, so I have to go investigate and learn about this.  I am also wondering if it is possible to remove the ambient audio that the iPhone records and replace it with the audio I've recorded in Reaper.

 

This is the first time I have stuck my toe in the video waters, so I apologize for the basic level of my questions.  If anyone has some experience doing this kind of thing, I appreciate any suggestions.  Thanks. 

[Anderton]

5 hours ago, JamPro said:

So I can easily record the audio of my keyboard playing in Reaper, while simultaneously recording the visual using my iPhone.

 

That's actually the best of all possible worlds, because you have individual video and audio tracks. What you need is a DAW-like program that can import video and audio. Many DAWs can do that nowadays, for example Studio One has a video track. I don't know what platform you use, but Mixcraft (Windows-only) has the most developed video track editing of any mainstream DAW (yes, including Pro Tools, LOL). (One of the main programmers worked on the Vegas video editing program, and incorporated some useful video editing options.)

 

DaVinci Resolve is a free program that's incredibly sophisticated - probably overkill for what you want. But if you want to get further into video eventually, you might as well get started with something that you can grow with.

 

What you would do is import the phone's video and audio, and separate them to their own tracks if needed. Then, bring in the audio you recorded in Reaper, and line it up with the audio from the phone. Then you can remove the phone audio and use only the audio you recorded.

 

It is not necessary to sync (e.g., SMPTE) the Reaper audio to the phone audio. There won't be any audible drift for at least several minutes, and once you remove the phone audio, you almost certainly won't notice it anyway compared to the video. But if you do get drift, like over a 20-minute live recording, split the audio every minute or so, and line it up with the phone audio. The time difference bewteen sections will be so small you can simply crossfade between the two sections.

 

Does that help? 

 

 

[Philbo King]

I did a video with Reaper using a cell phone plus separate recorded audio tracks.  

[Warning: political content]

There is an option in Reaper project settings to completely remove the phone audio from playback.

It worked fine...

 

It is more involved than simple audio; if you do several takes it is crucial to keep track of which video snippet is associated with which audio take.

[Anderton]

It may be political, but it's not partisan,. and the warning was considerate. So I don't mind having it in the thread.

 

One recommendation: A think the vocal would benefit from a little higher level and a bump around 3.5 kHz, or a high shelf boost starting a little lower than that.

[JamPro]

Thank you Mr Anderton for your helpful reply.

 

So after doing a little reading, I was successfully able to import the iPhone video into Reaper.  The video audio shows up as a Reaper audio track.  The visual part of the video is also imported and can be viewed by opening up a Reaper video window, and will "play" along with the audio.

 

So yes: it should be possible for me to record myself playing using my iPhone, while simultaneously recording the piano audio into Reaper, and then import the iPhone video into Reaper and swap out the iPhone audio for the audio recorded (and EQ'ed, and compressed, or whatever) in Reaper.

 

Yahoo!  Thanks again.

[Anderton]

One thing to remember is that videos are all based on smoke and mirrors. Once I wanted to do a multi-camera shoot of a band playing. The only problem was...one camera. So, that one camera was set up to capture the actual performance while recording the music to a separate recorder. Then while playing back the recorded audio from the performance, the band members played ("lip-synched") along with it. There was a separate video of the lead singer, one of the guitar player, one of the drummer, and one of the bassist. These were all thrown on the timeline. Because they were all playing to the music, each take (which included audio the camera captured) could line up with the real music of the performance.

 

Camera 1 did most of the work, but additional close-ups of individual players could be cut in when the lip-synching/playing along was tight. Even when it wasn't, for example with guitar you could pan up to the player's expression. So the video looked like it was a multi-camera shoot, even though it was all based on one shoot of one performance.

[BluMunk]

Sounds like you have it figured out. I am a novice at recording and video, but I'll add that while you can do things in Reaper, you can also go the other direction, and export your desired audio file and use Apple's bundled 'iMovie' app to combine the audio file with the video file already on your phone. 

 

Not quite as easy to get alignment to the exact frame you want, but here's a video I did (my own humble arrangement of Never Never Land for a vocalist to sing over) using my iphone to capture video, Logic to capture audio, and then combined together with iMovie in my phone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BM3N6yNiYI0

 

I wouldn't use that process if I was stacking more than one audio track or more than one video track (like @Philbo King 's project above), but for a simple 1 video/1 audio project, it worked for me.