lining up virtual choir

[zzzmoose]

Thanks to you all for your valuable input. I have completed (it will never be complete) my virtual choir video with your help. I did not do a perfect alignment, but like Mark said, a perfect alignment would have done more harm than good. i used a combination of cutting and moving along with a lot of use of the warp feature, which is really cool by the way, and it really sounds better than the initial pass, but not too mechanical. I tried to upload it here, but the file was too big. I'll try to get it onto youtube and post a link. thanks again for all your help.
Jim

[Acoustica Greg]

Hi,

Yes, please post a link!

Greg

[freightgod]

Yes this would be interesting to hear. be neat to hear a clip of the original too

[zzzmoose]

here's an unlisted link to the video on youtube. don't know how well the sound will come through, but hopefully you get the idea. please don't share the link. my dad's church has streaming rights for it, but i don't know if that means only within the church service or if it means it can be streamed anywhere. also not sure why YouTube defaults to 360p in my browser, but the video is in 1080p, so select that in your settings if it looks a little blurry.

https://youtu.be/zE4xQ1niq10

would love any feedback. freightgod, there wasn't really an original, it was kind of a build it as you go deal. i definitely learned a lot about mixcraft along the way. thanks again for all your feedback!!

[Rolling Estonian]

Whoa! That's awesome!!!!!

M

[zzzmoose]

hey thanks!

[freightgod]

Wow, that was really really well done.

Did you use the organ as a cue up? What did people record to? Did you go from place to place? Or are you strictly working from submitted videos?

Sounds amazing for so many sound sources!

[zzzmoose]

Thank you! We did use the organ as a guide, plus our director was conducting, plus she recorded piano tracks for each part to go along with the organ plus and initial clap sound which all culminated in a rehearsal video for each part in the choir. We had the choir view and listen to the rehearsal track in headphones, and film/record their part with a second device (their phone in most cases) on their own in their own homes. A few people were able to record their part at the church. they then uploaded their videos (a task in and of itself). once we received all the videos, I ran each of them through mixcraft at first to silence the noise and other extraneous sounds that popped out during breaks in the music (page turns, coughs, throat clearing, etc). then my dad pulled those cleaned up videos into adobe premiere elements and did a first pass at aligning them. once they were in line with the music and each other, he exported wav files (stems?) from the video editor and I pulled those into mixcraft again for tuning the alignment (using warping, cutting and moving and all the advice you all gave me) as well as balancing and mixing the voices and giving them a little reverb etc. 25 tracks including the organ. i will say, there were so many different levels of quality with these phone videos. sometimes it sounded like a room, sometimes a closet, but for instance the ones recorded at church (only a couple) were done in the sanctuary with TONS of a natural reverb. same for the organ. so they were all over the place. i didn't do much to make up for that fact. all the voices were so meshed together, that it was hard to tell anyway. and the ones that had horrible sound, i just turned down really low. (don't tell them). with a final sound track coming out of mixcraft, i married that to the videos in premiere elements, arranged the videos around the screen with a grid and did a last round of lip syncing with each person. finally, exported that to mp4 to complete the video.

thank you for the nice compliments. I think the church was very happy with the product and they have asked if I can do more for them. the key to it all was good participation by the choir. we had 20 videos on screen and at least 4 people did an extra part off screen to beef up the sections than had less participation (basses and altos). it was fun to do and mixcraft made it easy to get down and dirty with the alignment, to really correct those people that just sing to their own rhythm. Thanks again for the advice and encouragement. cheers!!

[freightgod]

Thank you for the details. I suspected that you may have had to lower the volume on some performances.

[zzzmoose]

Exactly, the levels were all over the place. People were standing different distances from different types of phone mics. some were naturally just louder than others and some had a meek and soft voice. It was really a mixed bag.

Just dabbling in this stuff, I'm in more and more awe at recording engineers, sound engineers, anybody who produces music. You really take for granted how good commercial music sounds today. There are a lot of tools to be had by even small timers like me, but it really takes a lot of know-how about music and those tools to produce quality material.