🎬 How to Make a Virtual Ensemble!

The school year is finally over, as is my first ever quarter of online teaching.

I wanted my students to end the year seeing themselves represented together, playing the same music, at the same time. So I sharpened my Final Cut skills and dove into the process of making a virtual ensemble.

The video in this post gives an overview of my process for making these videos, all the way from making a play along track, to advanced editing such as pitch and rhythm correction. The video includes a couple of my favorite Mac utilities for manipulating audio and video files. Scroll to the bottom to see all of the final videos of my students.

Apps Mentioned in the Video

• Apple Pro Apps Educators Discount
• Transcribe!
• Audio Hijack
• Dr. Betotte
• Anytune
• Permute

If you want free alternatives to the apps in the video, try:

• VLC - for file conversion
• The Amazing Slow Downer - for slowing down audio tracks

To edit on iPadOS, try:

• Ferrite - for audio editing
• LumaFusion - for video editing

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Here are the final videos...

🎬 Vivo! - The Ellicott Mills Middle School Wind Ensemble (Virtual Band Video)

Here is the first of a few "virtual band" videos I have been editing over the past few weeks. I am proud of my students for their hard work in unfamiliar conditions. I enjoyed making this a lot, but for different reasons than I enjoy teaching band.

I really refined my audio and video editing workflow for this. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for a video post on how I made this using Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and handful of other indie Mac apps.

🔗 Gizmodo: 6 Free Final Cut Pro Alternatives for Making Your Own MoVies

While Final Cut Pro still gets my vote, this list will probably be useful to my music teaching friends looking to make virtual ensemble videos.

6 Free Final Cut Pro Alternatives for Making Your Own Movies

Video editing is easier than it’s ever been, with the barrier to entry becoming less pricey every year. As long as you have some decent footage to work with, you can turn it into something presentable—and dare we say professional—using programs that won’t cost you anything. Here are six of the best free video editors to help you unleash your inner Oscar-winning director.

🎬 My Online Learning Welcome Video

Teachers in my district were tasked with making a welcome video introducing students to the first week of distance learning.

After denying several times that I would put any serious effort into this project, I inevitably got carried away and spiraled down a rabbit hole of apps, workflows, and tricks. Musicians and teachers are feeling a special kind of hunger right now to be creative. I am thankful for software and internet connected tools that help me to communicate in a unique way.

First, enjoy the video below:

The video was produced with the following software:

Apple Clips App

(Download here) 

Apple Clips App might be the only one of these apps you need. It is a free Apple app that is kind of like a cross between iMovie and Photo Booth. Its intended purpose is to make quick, engaging videos, designed to be shared in the age of Instagram Stories.

Clips is how I got my Memoji head to appear on my body. It will also automatically caption your video for you. It can bring in numerous effects, call outs, emoji, backdrops, and can even do still images of words. You could make a video that accomplishes the same general effects as mine in next to zero effort using only Clips. 

Clips allows you to integrate Animoji, Filters, Text, Stickers, and Emoji to your live video.

Clips automatically adds captions in a style you like. You can edit them after the fact.

You can record yourself speaking over static posters to communicate information in an engaging way.

iMessage

iMessage is where I made my Memoji. It is also another place that you can get a Memoji head on top of your body (see screenshots below). I used this method for a few scenes in the video, instead of Clips, because it can shoot in landscape view. Clips produces square video only.

An alternate way to film yourself with a Memoji head is to open up a text message conversation to someone or yourself.

Select the camera icon right above the keyboard, and then tap the effect button in the lower left corner.

Next, select the Animoji icon, and then select your own Memoji.

Final Cut Pro X

Final Cut is an industry standard video editor. It is currently free for 90 days. If you know iMovie and want to go deeper, this will be the easiest option for you. 

I used Final Cut to dump all of my audio, video, and photo assets, and to mix them all down into the final product. I didn’t use Final Cut to do anything iMovie can’t do except for the fancy moment where multiple videos show up on top of the main video at once (and it was very important to me that it do this).

ScreenFlow 

(Download here)

ScreenFlow is like the iMovie of making screencasts. It can do fancy video automations and call out things happening on the screen (like mouse clicks, taps, type our whatever your keyboard is doing, etc…)

ScreenFlow’s editing tools are almost as easy as iMovie and it is so powerful, I probably could have probably made the entire video in it. There is a free version if you don’t mind a watermark on the final product.

Keynote

Keynote is what I used to make the nice slides with information. I used ScreenFlow to record my screen as I tabbed through the presentation in time along to an audio recording of my voice over.

Logic Pro

Apple’s premiere audio editing software. Free for 90 days right now. If you have used GarageBand, the basics of Logic will feel familiar to you. I used it to record some of the voice overs in the video but it is frankly unnecessary. I just wanted to use my nicer microphone and it happened to be plugged into the Mac I already use to edit audio in Logic.

Downie

(Download here)

Downie is how I downloaded some video and audio assets from the web to my Mac’s hard drive. 

Permute

(Download here)

This is a beautiful and fuss-free Mac app that converts video and audio from one file format to another.

Prompt Lite for iPad

(Download here)

This free teleprompter allows you to write a script and have it appear in large text on your iPad’s screen. It automatically paces through the words as you read them.

Others

I also used OmniOutliner to outline the original ideas, BBEdit to write the script, and YouTube to publish, but those are largely unnecessary. 

If this seems overwhelming, I assure you that you could make close to the same result in just iMovie or Apple Clips with next to zero effort. I have been locked inside for weeks and wanted to learn some of the skills required to polish up a video in Final Cut. I hope you enjoyed it.