Quote
For example: Can I create a 10X7 evenly spaced grid and drop each individual video tracks into a unique box in that grid?

Or if there's another way I should be doing this....I'm all ears

Thanks! Ed

You can enable grid lines in the preview window. Just click the icon to the right of the camera icon, and then select Grid Lines. You can't create a custom grid, so you will have to get creative using 8x8 or 9x9.

Ash

Quote


You can enable grid lines in the preview window. Just click the icon to the right of the camera icon, and then select Grid Lines. You can't create a custom grid, so you will have to get creative using 8x8 or 9x9.

Ash

Thanks. I guess what I was looking for is creating a custom grid. So it looks like I need to get creative.

Ed

Quote


Thanks. I guess what I was looking for is creating a custom grid. So it looks like I need to get creative.

Ed

Hi,

The most common methd is to use a suitable grid produced in any image/drawing program. The grid should have a transparent background and be in .png format.
It should be placed on the lowest track so that it is at the "front", with the same duration as the finished video, and it will act as a positioning guide. The track can then be switched on/off as required.
The colour and width of the gridlines can be user defined to suit, so that they could also act as a border for each inset video if that is advantageous.
Cheers,
PowerDirector Moderator

Hi Ed

Are you working on a Virtual Choir video? I've done several of these, though not with as many as 70 - the most I had was 30 singers and 15 in the orchestra. It'd be great if you would post a link to your finished project (I assume it will be on YouTube?) so that we could see the finished result. You might also be interested in a Facebook page 'Virtual Music Creators' Forum' (make sure you get the apostrophe right!), which is a mine of information, though very Final Cut Pro-orientated.

Creating the grid in a graphics package is a good idea - also, you can turn on the Grid View in the Preview Window and then snap clips to that. This would help in getting the clips at more or less the same size, then you can edit/finetune the size of each one by right-clicking the clip in the timeline, selecting 'Edit Clip Keyframe' and then 'Clip Attributes'.

I found that having even just 20 full-length videos all running at once became very unwieldy, so find a way of working on just a few subsets (maybe Sopranos, then Altos and so on) and Rendering (Producing) each one before working on the next subset. So for example, work on just 10 clips, and then the next 10 and so on, meaning that in the end you will have just 7 videos playing at once. Forward planning and graph paper are essential for this!

Also, I find it imperative, with a Choir recording, to work on the audio seperately and in another program (audio is not PD's strong point). Then strip out the audio from your videos (do this before Producing each subset edit) and use just that one audio mixdown track

Good luck!