Technical help thread

Hello,
I’m shite with technology but I was hoping one of you could explain this to me.

How would someone go about making a video like this? Essentially my school want to do something similar as we can’t do a production this year.

We want to individually record singing then have all the individual videos alongside each other on the screen and preferably look reasonably slick.
We also would like it so you can have audio for each video rather than one recording over the top.

Also, must be using free software and on windows as we don’t have good technology nor any money.

Cheers!

Reckon you’ll need a video camera of some sort

Should I plug it in?

Not done something like this myself, but I imagine you’d provide everyone with a metronome, click track or original track they can listen to on headphones to deal with the timing, and then using something like the default windows video editor software to compile the videos together. Should be a fairly straightforward video, just need to shrink and move the composite videos and cut the bits and pieces as you want.

If you’re more familiar with a DAW, video editing stuff follows similar principles with timeline and effects. The audio from each video stays associated with that video, so as you chop and change videos in the timeline, it’ll only use the audio you want it to use.

You might have to do some work dealing with the variety of volume levels you’ll get through with the original recordings, or maybe ask the parents to do something similar with all of them.

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There’s a guide here that might be of use?

https://www.virtualchoir101.com/how-to-create-a-virtual-choir-performance/

Looks like you need a combination of Audacity for the vox and OpenShot for the video.

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Obviously make a track for people to sing to. Make sure they wear headphones and only record their voice and not the playback. Put em all in editing software. Edit. Dunno how advanced the free ones would be for this level of picture in picture type stuff but i guess you can try.

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@colon_closed_bracket @ma0sm
Thanks guys, this is a useful starting point for me to get my head round it!

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No worries, I’d follow Colon’s guide though as I’ve never done this personally. However I HAVE done a video before where it included many videos from people who had sent their clips in, and in that experience, all I’d say is that when you contact people to ask them what to do for the video, send a detailed, exhaustive list of instructions once with everything they need to do without asking a single question (including the lack of backing track, file format, where to upload it, that sort of thing), because if you miss anything and have to do back and forth then it gets messy and complicated.

The majority of people still won’t follow your instructions or only part of them, but you can only do your best.

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I know this only too well in this job!

Cheers, some of the software in the article CCB posted looks hopefully easy enough for me to use.

Luckily we’ve got some of the children in school so we could potentially send it to those at home as an example of what to do.

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You definitely want some kind of accompaniment btw, a piano or something at least or everyone will sing in a different key.

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you could ask the ones that are bad at singing to sing really quiet and that way the final thing will sound better

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