Word follow-along type effect??

[Dan Shallenberger]

Details: Final Cut Studio on a G5

I'm editing a video now that has some little kids singing, and I would love to drop the words in along the bottom of the screen, highlighting each word that is sung... kind of like the bouncing ball thing, but I only want the current word highlighted. Is there a plugin that would help with this?

I've tried dropping in several layers and using a colored box with the composite mode set to luma to highlight each word as they sing it, and it works, but it's incredibly tedious. There's no way I can do each word for 5 songs like this.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Dan

[Bill Davis]

First, have you investigated karaoke software? There might be something that does this easily. But I don't have any direct experience with it.


Knowing that vocal kid music is typically repetative in tempo and rhythm ...

I suppose my approach to doing this manually but still kinda easily would be to look at the song, figure out how many words you need for the largest stanza - (eg Mary had a little lamb - is a 5 word stanza sung over seven beats . So I'd create seven text graphics each with six unhighlighted words and the highlight word in a different position.

Time the clips so the word changes roughly follows the song tempo.

Put the seven clips on the timeline, then copy the group and paste them over and over.

Bingo, you have seven hightlight words cycling in repetitave sequence.

For stanzas with less than 7 words, remove some clips.

Then just open each clip and change the text to the appropriate word and tweek the clip length if necessary to match the tempo of the words being sung.

The good news is that most songs repete chorus's - and that's cut and paste simple

Not ideal and still a bit of work, but a lot easier than changing highlight vectors word by word.

FWIW