MAJOR issue: changing tempos changing entire project

[Moving Air Productions]

I'm working on scoring an indie film right now, and I'm having MAJOR problems doing it in my favorite DAW, Cakewalk.

The biggest issue I'm running into is the fact that, no matter what I do, if I add a tempo change marker later in the film, using only  "jumps" from tempo marker to tempo marker,  it still moves everything in front of that marker around. It SHOULDN'T: I mean, If I change a tempo marker at the 50 minute marker, why the hell should it affect things up at the 40 minute point, right? But yet it does. BADLY.

I tried setting everything to absolute time, which worked great for any real audio tracks, but it destroyed the MIDI tracks. It would move them, condense or extend the tracks, etc. And even if it didn't move the track, it would usually knock the MIDI out of time, so I would have to stretch and/or re-quantize. So I would get close to the end of the film, and have to go back and basically rebuild and realign the entire film. And if I leave things set to  a 'musical' time base, it's even worse, because then all the audio shifts around as well.

I like the idea of using the Shift+M feature to align my measures to match cuts in the scene. Seems like an extremely practical feature, right? And, the way I see it, that should only affect as far back as the tempo of the previous marker; making the previous tempo marker faster or slower to adapt that number of measures to fit that amount of time, right? But if I change the tempo, it will move markers, sometimes going all the way back to the beginning of the film. And - again - shift parts well ahead of where I'm working. So it's work, back-track to fix what Cakewalk has screwed up, work, backtrack, work, backtrack, and on and on.

So I'm PLEADING with the powers that be at Cakewalk: PLEASE fix the system so that:
1. Adding a tempo change or using Shift+M to move the beat of a measure does not affect ANYTHING before the previous tempo marker.
2. Protect MIDI tracks from shifting, stretching, and/or collapsing when tempos are changed, so nothing has to be rebuilt at the 30 minute mark because tempo changes were made at the 60 minute mark.

Adding a tempo change should ONLY affect what comes after it, not before. And using Shift+M to shift the start of a measure to fit a cut should ONLY affect things up to the previous tempo marker.

There are other things I'd love to see as well (better video display, a faster way to find what you're looking for when you have a ton of tracks and you're scrolling through all the vertical files, and BETTER ZOOM FOCUS. If I've selected a track and use Ctrl+up/down to zoom in, STAY FOCUSED ON THE SELECTED TRACK!!), but these are the biggest things wasting massive amounts of my time right now.

Edited March 10, 2022 by Moving Air Productions

[Byron Dickens]

I don't have any such issues here. Are you sure you don't have change most recent tempo selected instead of add new ltempo?

[Moving Air Productions]

2 hours ago, bdickens said:

I don't have any such issues here. Are you sure you don't have change most recent tempo selected instead of add new ltempo?

Yes. I've had to rebuild this film twice now because of issues from adjusting tempos. I'm currently going thru it, rebuilding everything, and once something is fixed, setting it to "absolute" time base and locking it's position and data. I'm hoping beyond hope that this is a work-around for my issue.

Do you do much with 1+ hour film editing using the tempo map to match measures and cuts, Bdickens? If so, I'd love any additional pointers on this, because I've wasted two days on fixing what's gotten screwed up.

[Byron Dickens]

Chill out, man. I asked a simple question that just requires a simple answer. I don't think it calls for you acting as if I have cast  aspersions upon your ancestry.

I do tempo changes all the time and inserting a new tempo does not change anything that came before it.

[OutrageProductions]

I work on film over 90 minutes and have never had any issues with tempo changes by jump OR gradual ramping.

I set my markers to SMPTE and also have MBT on the timeline for tempo, lock the markers and everything goes swimmingly. 

As previous poster stated: make sure that you're INSERTING  tempo change, not modifying existing.

Cheers.

[msmcleod]

1. As others have said, make sure you're inserting tempos, not altering the first one.  It's far easier to see what is going on by using the tempo track / tempo inspector.

When using the tempo track, make sure you add a node at the existing tempo at the place you want the tempo change. Then add a new node and drag it to the new tempo. This will ensure your tempos before the tempo change aren't affected, e.g. :

 

2.  MIDI data will always follow the current tempo. 

You can set the start time of the clip to absolute, but changing the tempo will always change the tempo of any MIDI clips. 

In practice, this shouldn't be an issue unless you've got different MIDI clips playing at the same time which need a different tempo.  The only way around this is to render your MIDI as audio, and move the audio to the place where you're changing tempo.

The way I'd probably do this, is to have an area after the video where I have my MIDI data.  I'd then edit the MIDI as I see fit without affecting the rest of the project. Once I'm happy with it, I'd freeze it, copy the audio to the place it's meant to go in time to a separate audio track, 

Note that I'd only do this for the exceptions - i.e. MIDI based sound fx or small motifs.  The main parts should always be following the project tempo at that point.

Alternatively, you could have small motifs at different tempos in a separate project, and have both projects open at the same time.  You could then render the audio in your motif project, and copy them as audio to the main project where your video resides.

[Moving Air Productions]

11 hours ago, bdickens said:

Chill out, man. I asked a simple question that just requires a simple answer. I don't think it calls for you acting as if I have cast  aspersions upon your ancestry.

I do tempo changes all the time and inserting a new tempo does not change anything that came before it.

Don't take it negatively. I was literally saying that, if you have more experience working with long-form videos, I would love some advice. I'm new to it and there has to be a better way than what I'm doing. I did not mean it in a pissy way.

[Moving Air Productions]

So I've been experimenting with this, and I think my mistake was simply not knowing to lock the midi sections once they were in place. I didn't realize that was a thing, and now what I'm doing that, everything seems fine when I set the measures to the video. Rookie mistake.  Now I'm going thru the video, re-setting everything to where it should be, and locking it. I don't seem to be having issues with midi stretching/collapsing, even using Shift+M. It was setting measures to cuts that was doing all the damage.

There doesn't seem to be much info out there about using the Shift+M feature. It's super handy for pushing/pulling the tempo to make beat one start right at a specific point, like a video cut. But I didn't know how it would completely affect everything if your existing audio/midi wasn't locked in place first.

Again, rookie mistakes. Thanks everyone for your input.