In this three-part series of posts, I’ll take you through why and how to make one of those charming multi-screen, multi-track musical videos, based on my own experiences. I’ve used software that’s freely available online [though see update below!], and I’m very much coming at this from the perspective of an amateur video editor, in the hope that my tribulations might make life easier for anyone contemplating putting one of these together.

Click here for Part 1 & Part 2

[Update, March 2021: I’ve recently done a couple more of these videos, and decided to return to these posts, to see if they can be made more helpful, in the light of my more recent experiences. Most importantly, I’ve downgraded the headline from ‘free’ to ‘free*’. It’s definitely possible to do this with freely available software – but I’ve found that spending a little money on professional editing software makes the process roughly 10 times easier and more enjoyable.]

We’ve got our audio. Now it’s time to put the video together.

Step 3: Transcoding the video

This sounds fancy, but it’s really just the process of making sure all the videos you’ve been sent will play nicely with each other. Different phones produce different kinds of files, and film at different frame-rates. Handbrake will put them all into a format that Premiere/Lightworks can handle.

NB Phone cameras generally use variable frame rate (VFR) to make the size of the file smaller. Many video editing programmes don’t like that, as it makes things much harder to line up – that’s why we’re ‘transcoding’ the videos to use a constant frame rate (CFR)

• Add the file to Handbrake when prompted
• From the presets, select ‘Production Standard’
• On the ‘Video’ tab, make sure you’ve selected ‘Constant Frame Rate’, and specified a frame rate to work at. 30fps is fine for our purposes. It should be the same for all the video files in the project
• Press ‘Encode’ to generate the new file, and give it a new name so you know it’s the version you’re going to use
• Do this for all the videos you’ve been sent

Step 4: Assembling the video

• Create your project in Premiere Pro/Lightworks (or use the preexisting conducting video project) and add all the newly-transcoded videos, each with their own Video and Audio track
• To create that split-screen effect, select each clip, and make each video smaller (using Scale), then change its position along the X and Y axes (using Position) (DVE in Lightworks) (see Note below)
• Soon enough, you’ll have a screen full of videos. Now, in the EDIT tab, you can line them up with each other by using the audio of each track, and lining up the ‘clap’ waveform, just as you did when lining up the audio
• This done, you can mute all the audio tracks and import the one you’re actually going to use – the mixdown from Cubase we made in Part 2
• Export the edit
• You could leave it like this, but if you want to add transitions and fades-in etc, rather than use the same project, create a new project and import the video you just made. This reduces the burden on the computer processor
• That’s it!

Note: The Grid

There’s some maths to be done here – work out by what factor you need to make each clip smaller in order for them to fit into the grid.* In the end I used a 7×7 grid to accommodate my 27 participants. I suspect there’s a more elegant solution out there. I could have used a 6×6 grid, of course, but then my conducting video would have been off-centre, and I couldn’t allow myself not to be the centre of attention!

This is greatly complicated by the fact that not everyone will have sent you a video of the same size. A video of dimensions 1980×1080 will need a different scale factor applied to it to make it the same size as one which is in 640×480. Get out the calculator if you can be bothered, or you can eyeball it if you’re feeling lucky.

I got sent a couple of portrait videos. At that stage I decided that rather than asking them to repeat in landscape, I would simply crop and scale them to look landscape, in a rather trial-and-error process.

In my first videos, I just nestled the videos up next to each other with no gap in between – I felt it looked neater than separating them. However, subsequently I experimented with ‘feathering’ the edges of each individual video, which helps make them look more uniform (see here for an example).

Premiere Pro has an effect called ‘Edge Feather’ which is supposed to do this, but for reasons best known to itself, it didn’t work in the largest video I’ve made (circa 40 participants). I hit upon the (very fiddly) solution of using an online picture editor to create a 7×7 grid, blurring the edges, then overlaying it on top of the other videos. Here is the result. In hindsight, it might have been wiser to create the grid before importing any of the videos.

Note: The Background

By default, your background will be black, but this makes the videos show up very starkly and will highlight any inconsistencies in the way they are filmed. Instead, I used the colour-picker tool to lift an off-white colour from the background wall of one of the videos, and created a background ‘matte’ from it, to go behind all the videos. I like the ‘clean’ effect it gives the final video.

Final Thoughts

There are probably a number of ways I’ve made this more complicated than it has to be. I have, though, generated a work-flow that seems to get the results I’m after. As I’ve mentioned, you can take bits of it that you like, and incorporate them into your own way of doing it – let me know what you come up with!

I’m probably going to end up making more of these, and I’m keen to refine the process. I think it’s worth conductors dabbling – these formats are not going away. Judge for yourself below..!