Workarounds for a marker track?

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spencer335
Posts: 59
Joined: 25 Jun 2015

20 Aug 2018

Hi all -

Thinking about film scoring applications, is there any workaround you've used to mark a specific point in time such that you can adjust your tempos such the bar lines will line up to a specific moment?

I've got VidPlayVST to host my video while I'm working in Reason - but I still don't have an optimum workflow without looking at the sequencer in terms of absolute time (rather than bars, which will shift based on tempo)

Thanks for any ideas!

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chimp_spanner
Posts: 2908
Joined: 06 Mar 2015

21 Aug 2018

Yeah I'm not too sure how to make this work tbh. The only thing I can think of - and I'm just thinking out loud while I work so it might not be well thought through - is to place some blips/ticks at the points in your video you want to mark, and render that to an audio file, then disable stretching on it. Then as the tempo changes the blips on the waveform will stay at the correct positions in absolute time and you'll have at least something to work with in the arrange window. I'm not sure if that's gonna be useful to you but it's all I can think of in light of the absence of an absolute time mode for tracks!

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selig
RE Developer
Posts: 11685
Joined: 15 Jan 2015
Location: The NorthWoods, CT, USA

21 Aug 2018

chimp_spanner wrote:Yeah I'm not too sure how to make this work tbh. The only thing I can think of - and I'm just thinking out loud while I work so it might not be well thought through - is to place some blips/ticks at the points in your video you want to mark, and render that to an audio file, then disable stretching on it. Then as the tempo changes the blips on the waveform will stay at the correct positions in absolute time and you'll have at least something to work with in the arrange window. I'm not sure if that's gonna be useful to you but it's all I can think of in light of the absence of an absolute time mode for tracks!
That’s a pretty genius solution - I was just going to comment that there was no “absolute” marker in Reason, but you’ve solved that problem. But it’s tricky to do it so it will actually work as expected. Read on, fearless Reasoners…

The best solution may be to use a 2-pop, which is frame of a 1 kHz tone placed two seconds before the program start. In this case you just put it directly on the location of choice. At 24 or 25 FPS you would have around a 40ms long “pop”, and at 30 FPS it would be 33 ms.

Then you export this sample to a useful place, then simply import it and place it where you want to mark in the timeline. To do this, position the play head in the correct location, then navigate to the sample and double-click on it (after creating an audio track).

Then (sadly) there is still another step or to involved. First, you need to disable stretch and also extend the clip head/tail (extend the head to the top of the song). Finally, you need to bounce clip to new recordings, and THEN it will work.

The reason you need to extend the end is because the audio in the clip can extend OFF the end of the clip if you increase the tempo after doing all of the above. This is an unfortunate “bug” in how Reason handles audio clips, which is to say that even when the audio stretch is disabled, the clip boundaries are STILL locked to bar and beat - thus the audio inside of the clip will move, but the clip itself (the start and end point) will NOT! Ugg, took a long time to figure this one out… ;(

This bug is why you cannot just paste a clip in an audio track and disable, and why it’s important to extend the front of the clip all the way to the top as well. If you don’t do ALL of these things, it will not work (and even then it works unlike ANY other DAW in my experience).

Here's an audio file (2-pop) to try for yourself:
2_Pop.wav.zip
(5.6 KiB) Downloaded 34 times

Sent from some crappy device using Tapatalk
Selig Audio, LLC

spencer335
Posts: 59
Joined: 25 Jun 2015

21 Aug 2018

Thanks 'spanner and selig for the thoughtful and detailed responses. The audio finagling sounds like something that will get me in trouble, though I could see practicing it if I had to.

But, selig's answer scared me enough that I believe I have found another hack that works better for me! Read on ...

It involves using another DAW ... but here is the scheme: I used Studio One (which has solid marker track functionality) to set up all of the tempo and time signature changes such that I could have a static marker and have key moments arrive at downbeats. From there, I saved the Studio One song as a MIDI file and dragged this midi file into the sequencer's Tempo and Time Signature tracks. Oh my - it worked!

So, of course there are no actual markers that I can label and it is still a 2 DAW workflow, but as long as I keep myself organized I can at least take care of my tempo and time signature changes elsewhere and then handle my sound design in Reason 10 with all my VSTs and favorites lists accessible.

This would of course be redundant if we get video scoring features in Reason 11!

spencer335
Posts: 59
Joined: 25 Jun 2015

21 Aug 2018

UPDATE: There may be some arbitrary extra steps here. I found that the Studio One file has to have at least one track on it with some midi data for the import to Reason to work. Reason also creates ID8 tracks for these midi notes that should be deleted.

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