Make a Music Video with Many Video Tracks in Corel VideoStudio

Making a music video often requires transitioning between multiple video clips. Many video editing programs have many effects for transitioning between video clips. The most common transition effect is the cross fade. In Corel VideoStudio, you can apply this transition by dragging it over the two video clips where they meet. Since this is a cross fade, the duration of the two clips necessarily becomes smaller. If you have a separate audio track and you want the video track to be in sync with the audio track, the crossfade transition will cause the video to become out of sync with the audio track. To maintain synchronousness and for transitioning many video clips, use the track transparency feature. The instructions below are for making a music video with multiple video tracks and a separate audio track.

1. Record Video Footage

You can do this using your phone. Just remember to record in landscape. If you want to show a different background behind the subject, make sure to film against a green screen.

2. Add Assets to Corel VideoStudio

The assets are things like each source video, music files, background images and videos, etc. Make sure you name each file something descriptive to make it easy to identify them when working with many tracks.

3. Drag the Background Image / Video to the Video Track

The first track in the list of tracks is the video track. Unlike the Video Overlay tracks, the Video track must start at time 0. If the background video is abstract and can be looped but is too short, you can duplicate it back to back as shown below.

4. Drag Each Video to a Separate Video Overlay Track

To start, each video can be positioned at time 0. Later, we’ll adjust the start time of each video so they are in sync with the music track. You can also mute each video track’s audio so the only audio heard comes from the music track.

5. Create Proxy Files

This will make VideoStudio use a smaller version of each file to improve performance. See how to set up proxy files.

6. Drag the Audio Asset to the Music Track

In this example, I positioned the start time of the music to 20 seconds to accommodate video clips that have a long but useless intro.

6. Sync Each Video Track with the Audio Track

To do this, read this post.

7. Determine Visibility Times for Each Video Track

Let’s say you want to make a music video containing 5 different singers each singing a different part of the song. You’ll have at least 5 video tracks to work with. You’ll need to listen to the song and determine what times throughout the song to show different videos. You can do this by creating a spreadsheet like below.

8. Set Cues / Markers on the Timeline

To make it easy to see start and end times for each video track, add a cue / marker (little green triangles below the timeline bar) on the timeline for each start time.

8. Create a Transition Between Each Video

To do this, we’ll be adjusting each video track’s transparency. In order for this to work, you can’t cut any of the video clips in the timeline.

For each track, click on the Track Transparency button to reveal the transparency controls.

In the screenshot below. you see multiple video tracks but only the transparency track for one of them. The vertical position of the yellow line indicates the video’s transparency at any given time. When the line is at the bottom (0), the video is completely transparent (0% opaque). When the line is at the top, the video is completely visible (100% opaque). You create a fade by adding keyframes to the yellow line and dragging them.

Below is a screenshot for a different video track. Notice how the transparency graph both of these video tracks are such that one video will fade out when the other fades in.

Sync Audio with Video in Corel VideoStudio Pro

Let’s say you want to make a music video of you lip syncing to a song. You have two files:

  • Video file of you lip syncing
  • Audio file of song

When you add these two files to VideoStudio Pro, you’ll need to adjust the start time of one so that the lip movement in the video file is in sync with the audio. One way to do this is as follows:

1. Add the audio file to the music track

2. Set a cue marker at first vocal point

Play the music track until you hear the first point in time when you hear the vocals. At that point set a marker by clicking on the bar underneath the timeline. A green triangle marker will appear. If you make a mistake in placing the marker, you can drag it to another position.

If you are having a hard time finding the first vocal point, set a preview range around the time of the first vocal point. Then, keep playing the preview range and update the marker position. To set a preview range,

  • Click on the timeline where the preview range would start. Then click the left bracket button [
  • Click on the timeline where the preview range would end. Then click the right bracket button ]

In the player control panel, you’ll see two yellow markers indicating the preview range relative to the entire project length.

In the timeline, you’ll see an orange bar indicating the preview ranger.

To play the preview range, make sure that “Project —” is selected / highlighted and not “Clip —”. Then click the play button. You can also click the loop button so the preview range plays repeatedly.

If the preview range appears very short, you can zoom in by clicking the + magnifying glass button.

Doing so allows you to see finer time increments in the timeline.

3. Add video to the Overlay 1 track

Don’t add the video to the Video track because doing so forces the video to begin from time 0 instead of a later time. Mute the audio in the Overlay 1 track by click the Mute icon.

4. Position the video to sync it with the audio

Drag the video track to the left and right and repeatedly play the preview range until the lip movement in the video is in sync with the vocal sound from the audio track.

Fix Images Using Adobe Lightroom Clone and Healing Brushes

If you’ve got a blemish or an unsightly object in an image, you can hide it by using either the cloning brush or the healing brush.

Cloning

Cloning is similar to copying some pixels elsewhere in an image and pasting it. This works in some situations but in others, it becomes obvious that you just copied and pasted.

Healing

The healing brush is similar to cloning except it tries to be smart so that the results look natural.

Here’s an example of a blemish in the sky.

And here’s the blemish gone with natural results using the healing brush.

With the healing brush, you tell Lightroom where the blemish is and then choose another area of the image to copy to fix the blemish.

Unsightly objects in the following images were removed using the healing brush.

Before
After
Before
After

Find Used CSS to Remove Unused CSS

When building websites, it’s inevitable that you’ll end up with a bunch of unused CSS as you make changes to the site. To remove unused CSS, you can use Sublime Text’s Get CSS Classes function to first find used CSS. Then, remove all CSS definitions that aren’t in that list.

  1. Open the HTML source in Sublime Text
  2. Click Edit > Tag > Get CSS Classes (this copies the used CSS classes to the clipboard)
  3. Paste the used CSS classes in a new file and sort alphabetically
  4. Go through each CSS definition and remove the ones not in the list of used CSS classes

Make Smooth Curves Using Google Drawings

Choose the “Curve” type of link

Click on the canvas to mark the starting point of the curve. Then click everywhere you want an inflection point. When you’re done, double-click to finalize the curve.

Click on the curve to show a bounding box with handles. Drag each handle to resize the curve.

Double-click on the curve to show the nodes on the curve. Then drag each node to shape the curve.

Tender and Juicy Mayonnaise-based Roasted Turkey

Roasting turkey or chicken can often lead to very dry meat. The secret to getting most, tender, juice chicken or turkey meat is by smothering it in mayonnaise or plain yogurt.

Ingredients

  • 1 (12- to 14-pound) whole turkey, thawed, neck and giblets removed
  • 1-1/2 cups of mayonnaise
  • 2 tablespoons minced fresh sage leaves, plus extra whole leaves
  • 2 tablespoons minced fresh thyme leaves, plus extra whole stems of leaves
  • 2 tablespoons minced rosemary, plus extra whole sprigs
  • 2 tablespoons minced fresh oregano, plus extra whole sprigs
  • 2 tablespoons coarse salt
  • 1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper
  • 3 stalks celery, rough chopped
  • 1 large onion, rough chopped
  • 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, cubed
  • 2 cups chicken broth, plus more if needed

Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven to 450F.
  2. Place turkey on a roasting rack in a roasting pan.
  3. Tie the turkey legs together with twine and tuck the wings underneath.
  4. In a small bowl, stir together mayonnaise, minced sage, thyme, rosemary and oregano.
  5. Rub mayonnaise and herb mixture all over the outside of the turkey.
  6. Season the turkey with salt and pepper.
  7. Place celery and onion inside the turkey cavity and drop extra pieces in the bottom of the roasting pan.
  8. Place the cubed butter inside of the turkey cavity. Insert the additional whole herbs into the turkey cavity.
  9. Pour two cups of chicken broth into the bottom of the roasting pan. Continue to add broth or water as the turkey is roasting if pan becomes dry.
  10. Roast the turkey for one hour. Reduce the oven heat to 350F and continue roasting, uncovered, until internal thermometer reaches 165F. Cover legs and breasts with foil halfway through the cooking process if the turkey begins getting too brown.  
  11. Remove the turkey from the oven. Cover loosely with foil and allow it to rest for at least 20 minutes before carving.
  12. Carve and serve.

View original recipe.

Best Floor Mops

If you need to mop a large floor to just remove dust, then consider the Casabella Spin Mop. There are many spin mops on the market but this one not only spin dries the mop to remove excess water before each mopping, it also spin rinses the mop to remove dirt.

Spin Rinse

Spin Dry

If, on the other hand, you need to mop a small area that has stuck-on dirt, like in a kitchen or bathroom, then the Bissel Steam Clean mop would do you well. The steam from the mop will melt dirt so it can be mopped away.

How to Send a Responsive HTML Email from Outlook on the web and Gmail

  1. Open the email in a browser and copy it’s source code
  2. Inline the CSS using a tool such as https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/tools/css-inliner/
  3. In Outlook on the web or Gmail, create a new email message
  4. In the body of the email, type some text that can easily be found, e.g. a bunch of hash symbols.
  1. Inspect the text you just typed and in your inspector, edit it by replacing the text you typed with the CSS-inlined email source code.
  1. Your email body will now show the HTML email. Click send.

Easily Clean Oven Window

Oven windows can get really dirty with baked-on grease. This makes it really hard to clean. Instead of manually scrubbing and wasting your time and energy, I found that using a steamer works pretty well. I use the Bissel Steamer.

You will it with water, wait for it to heat up, attach the hard bristle brush attachment, then pull the trigger to release steam as your gently melt and scrub the grease off.

The steam, which is really hot, will detach the dry grease from the glass but you’ll still need to remove the grease off the glass. For that, I use Clorox or Lyson disinfectant wipes. In general, these wipes are great for cleaning glass.

Now, when I make roasted tomatoes and turn on the oven light, I can actually see through the window again 🙂

Replace Batteries with DC Power Supply

I have some fairy lights used to light up some lanterns at home.

The lights are battery powered. I’m using rechargeable batteries but it’s still a hassle replace the batteries when they die. I decided to replace the batteries with a DC power supply which I can just plug in to an ordinary electrical outlet. I could then use a smart outlet to programmatically turn on the lights whenever I want.

To convert the batteries to use a DC power supply, here’s what I did.

  • Since the lights take 3 AA (1.5V) batteries, the total voltage I need the DC power supply to provide is 4.5 V. I an AC (120V) to DC (5V) power supply on Amazon with barrel to wire connector adapter for $9.
  • 1/2″ diameter round wood dowel from Home Depot (3 ft for ~ $3)
  • Speaker wire

I cut the wood dowel to the length of a AA battery. Drill a hole in one end. Partially screwed in a screw. Stripped the end off of a bit of speaker wire. Wound up the end of the wire around screw and screwed the screw in.

I then identified the positive and negative terminals in the battery pack and inserted my fake batteries in them. The wires from each fake battery were then connected to the corresponding positive and negative terminals to the DC power supply. Everything works.

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