Video help...

[Tubeydude]

Hi all,

It has been a while since posting.  I'm still on CBB versions 2024.10.  I have a short video that I want to put some words to.  I need to have the words synced to the video.

I was able to import the MP4 video into a track and can turn the video thumbnails on and off in the track lane.  However that does not give me the "resolution" I need to place the words correctly.  I tried opening video view from the right click context menu, and nothing happened.  Help says to go to Views-Video to open the view.  However, I don't see that option.  It also said to hit ALT-SHIFT-2.  Again, nothing happens.

Any ideas?  Thanks,

Tubeydude.

[Colin Nicholls]

I've never used Video tracks in Sonar so take this with a grain of salt.

Maybe this is a "use the right tool for the job" situation.

What I would do is the following. I would either do the project in something like DaVinci Resolve (which is free) rather than Sonar, or, I would play the video on another device or computer, and would talk.speak along with the video and get that track recorded in Sonar, then take my "final" audio and line it up with my guide track that I previously record.

(Unless you are providing the audio track yourself, then your guide track can be your actual track)

[Tubeydude]

I'm thinking I need to upgrade tot he free tier of Sonar anyway, as I see the CbB is on the way out soon.

Does anyone know if the new version of Sonar will  support video?

[Tubeydude]

Thanks Colin,  I might have to do that once I do some upgrading.    That could be a relatively simple work around.  Thanks for the other free program suggestion as well.

[dougalex]

I have had to use wmv files to get fully functional video import into Cakewalk/Sonar.

Can you convert to wmv and try it?

[57Gregy]

4 hours ago, Tubeydude said:

I'm thinking I need to upgrade tot he free tier of Sonar anyway, as I see the CbB is on the way out soon.

Does anyone know if the new version of Sonar will  support video?

Since forever, I think, all the SONARs, Music Creators, Pro Audios, et. al.  have never been video editors. They will play a video and allow you to record along with it, but you can't move the video, can't slice and dice it, can't add to it. It's just there so you can try to record and sync audio to the video.
That being said, I have never worked with vids except to see how it worked (in SONAR Home Studio, I think it was) years ago. Being a long-time reader of these pages, I have read from others with similar dilemmas and the best solution is to use a dedicated video editor.
What exactly do you mean by "resolution I need to place the words correctly"?

[Starship Krupa]

5 hours ago, Tubeydude said:

Does anyone know if the new version of Sonar will  support video?

It "supports" video to the extent that CbB does/did. Which is to say that you can play a video track that's sync'd to whatever audio track(s) you're working on. That's about it.

To add to what others have said, Sonar's video function is useful in cases where the video part is already mostly complete and you want to record or edit audio to go along with it. That sounds like what you're trying to do.

After I get the audio track together I export it from Sonar and import it to my video editor (Vegas Pro) for final rendering. Sonar can export video and audio together, but really, your NLE is going to give you more options for that. If you're making videos, you should have a video NLE with tools specific to that task.

Horses for courses as they say, and there are a number of free (or nearly so, just wait for a MAGIX video production Humble Bundle and you can pick up 3 of them for about $30) video NLE's that are purpose built for the task. Some NLE's (like Vegas) are not bad at handling multi-track audio either.

As for your issue with not being able to launch Video view although you can see thumbnails, that is indeed weird. I just tried it on my system and it worked fine. Video can be tricky because your system needs to have CODEC's capable of displaying whatever format you're trying to display. "MP4" is just a container format, there's a wide variety of video formats that can be within an MP4.

[Tubeydude]

Thanks all.  Yes, I am just going to add an audio track to an already edited video.  I installed the new free tier SONAR and the video view worked.  So I think I am good to go.  by resolution I meant seeing what was going on well enough to know when to place words, phrases.  With just thumbnails, there would be no way to see exactly when things were happening or changing.  Thanks again all for chiming in.  

[57Gregy]

25 minutes ago, Tubeydude said:

Thanks all.  Yes, I am just going to add an audio track to an already edited video.  I installed the new free tier SONAR and the video view worked.  So I think I am good to go.  by resolution I meant seeing what was going on well enough to know when to place words, phrases.  With just thumbnails, there would be no way to see exactly when things were happening or changing.  Thanks again all for chiming in.  

Cool. I understand now. Thumbnails are small.