Logic Pro 8 Import Audio From Movie... How to lock audio to movie?

Made To Feel

Logician
Hi -

I do a lot of work these days putting music to film & commercials. Often the rough video I'm working with will have a temp track (dummy music) which I am meant to match the feel of, or use as a template.

What I need to do is watch the video with the existing audio, find where the temp music starts, sync that moment up with a downbeat on my timeline, and start composing from there. However, when I move the video against the timeline, the original audio falls out of sync. Is there some way to take the imported audio and lock it to the video?

So far, I'm able to Open Movie to get video into the project, and I can Import Audio From Movie, see it in the Bin and place it at the start of the project, all that goes fine... I can set the movie start time in Project Settings -- but then I want the audio to move with it. Any input?

I'm working with Logic Pro 8.0.0 on an Intel MacBook Pro 2.2 Ghz, 4GB RAM
 
Generally when working to picture in Logic, it's not a good idea to move the video in the timeline. You generally want to have the video time and position remain absolute. The idea is for the video to remain constant, and then create tempo changes and/or odd meter bars in order to force specific moments to fall on downbeats. Better to manipulate things that way than to actually move the video around.

Having said that, make sure to lock your audio (associated with the video) to smpte position. That way it won't move or change when there are tempo/or meter changes.
 
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My take on it (thanks to the Macprovideo "music-for-picture" tutorial) is that you DON'T import the audio separately, therefore it stays locked to picture, and you can vary its volume either in the quicktime window or the settings/preferences box (can't remember which).
Also you can play with the SMPTE offset so you can bring your first downbeat closer to the beginning of your project. That is, one slide along the timeline for convenience, then as Eli says, lock it and move your audio from then on.

Steve
 
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Despite what the Macpro tutorial says...:) I find it very handy to have the audio on a track in Logic. It remains with the quicktime, in any case. If you want to hear it from the quicktime you simply have to raise the volume on the QT window. I find it much easier to mix the QT audio within the project.

In the tempo window, I usually assign bar 6 to 01:00:00:00 and I slide things around, depending upon the starting tempo, until everything suits me and then I lock it and don't think about it again for the duration of the project.
 
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While I approach music-to-video the same way as all the other responders here do, if you really want to lock the extracted audio track to the video that you've just moved, simply make sure you open a Float window (I think the default Key Command is "F") which will display the start point of your video clip when you select the video clip in the Arrange window. You can double-click in the Float window and Command-C Copy the start point of the video, then select your extracted audio, double click the start point in the Float window and Command-V Paste it, and the audio will jump to the correct start point.
 
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in the context I was rambling about, I discard the audio from the video track and replace it with the high quality audio from my studio mics...I'm usually editing "in-the-studio" videos of live music performance, so I just don't bother to make a track out of the audio. Otherwise, I agree with you both. I use Logic only when it is necessary, otherwise, Soundtrack Pro or other programs are much more efficient for audio-for-video. Obviously, you can glue the audio onto a much higher res video stream in FCP or similar...
 
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