One of the traditions on our team for the past 12 years has been to sing “Country Roads” by John Denver on our bus rides to competitions. However, since this year we were unable to go to any competitions due to COVID-19, we did something a little different. Check it out!
Legendary!
Definitely the best thing I’ve seen all day!
From 2:50 in the video onward, what editing software did you use to compile all the videos into one and combine the audio as well?
Or anyone else who has experience with that feel free to answer, thanks!
Why? Our ASB was thinking about doing this with the entire senior class (112 of us!) and we’re kind of technologically deficient…
So bold!
It’s amazing that so many who are probably way better with STEM topics than singing were willing to participate on video. That’s a totally different ask than singing on the team bus.
I wouldn’t say that I’ve got this on replay, but I’ve watched it more than once.
Bravo, 2638!
I used Final Cut Pro X to edit the entire thing. It took me about 10 hours in total, however, that last part took the majority of the time, and it was really difficult to do. Since everyone sung each part at a slightly different speed I had to play around with the speed settings for each person’s clip (and for most, needing to splice up the clip and adjust the speed in multiple places). And in terms of video layouts, I just made each clip 25% of the original size and played around with spacing and cropping till it fit perfectly.
That covered the basic stuff I had to do for video and audio. However, to get the audio to sound good-ish was a whole other story. I essentially played around with each person’s audio levels and made some louder than others to make it sound ok (and don’t tell my team members this, but I muted a couple people at the end who just, let’s say, didn’t make it sound better! 
). To be honest, I‘m no expert in this, I just played around with it until it sounded decent enough. You just need a lot of time and patience to make it happen.
That being said, you mentioned doing this with 112 members…this was just with 20 or so and it took sooooo much time and effort…so yeah. The only way I could see that happening with 112 ppl is if you really make sure each person is singing their line correctly beforehand — perhaps tell them to listen to the karaoke version of the soundtrack with headphones while they sing it into their microphone so they can get the timing right. If you can do that, it shouldn’t take too long to make the video.
Good luck! Reach out to me if you have any questions. And, in case anyone’s curious, here’s how my timeline looked!
And here’s how the timeline for the entire project looked like:
Thank you! We even did it entirely as sign-ups, meaning that everyone who was on the video volunteered on their own without anyone asking!
It certainly looks complicated, and a lot to bite off and chew over spring, but I think it’d be a fun adventure. The software you use comes with a hefty price tag ($300), but anything good quality requires some sort of payment. I see a lot of people using Adobe, which is $20 to $40, but do you know of any other software I can use? I don’t need to stretch (speed up and slow down) video; I just need audio level editing, video clipping, and it needs to support a ton of videos playing at once.
Thanks!
You might want to check out DaVinci Resolve. Its got a professional pedigree yet is somehow free to use. I have no idea if it or any software on a desktop (even a high-end desktop with high-end GPU) could handle the ton of simultaneous videos you are planning, but Resolve is no toy and is available to try.
Yeah I’d second what paulonis said, DaVinci is pretty powerful and is free.
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