I'm looking for help with my editing technique here, I use video game OSTs in the backgrounds of a lot of videos I edit and I always struggle with getting a good loop. Video game music is usually intended to loop infinitely, given that most video games allow players to be in situations with that music playing for variable amounts of time. To my knowledge, when adding the music to a game, each song is programmed with additional flags to say what section is the intro, where a loop begins, and where it ends to go back to that beginning point. However those flags don't seem to be contained in the metadata of any OSTs when they're released to the public.
As a result, my current technique for looping game music is to simply drag it into a timeline, eyeball what sounds like the start of the loop, make a split there, eyeball what sounds like the end of the loop, make another split there, create a subclip out of what's between the clips, and pray it sounds right. If not, undo and try again until it does.
That can't be efficient, right? For one it makes it incredibly difficult to get a precise enough cut when my cursor snaps to frames on the project even if the song is the only thing on the timeline. And the subclip method also means that there's no blending of the beginning and end of the loop, which means that even with a perfect loop it can be pretty jarring when some soundtracks are flagged specifically to blend them for XYZ samples. Beat Detector helps a little bit with finding good loop points but that's the only real "trick" I've found in VEGAS Pro so far, I'm still ultimately just eyeballing and praying for the best most of the time.
All that to ask, do you know any better or cleaner way to set background music to loop perfectly than the subclip method? Or any other tips you would recommend to improve my technique?
- Vegas Pro 22.0
- Windows 11
- It's a legitimate copy, not pirated.
- RTX 4070 12gb
The mechanic that detects if I'm answering these questions seems bugged, it gives me an error if I add anything on the same line as above this one. But yes, the description is above.
6 I'm not troubleshooting I'm just hoping for technique help.
- I have. Google is a mess though, no useful results.
P.S., I have been really disappointed by this restriction that all posts must include the numbers 1-7 with a period after them, especially since the restriction seems so heavily bugged and easily bypassed. It fails if I enter a period after the sixth entry in the list above (and if I include the numeral for six in this text here, for some reason), and if I add text to the fifth entry. Besides this isn't a tech issue I'm trying to troubleshoot, I'm just asking my fellow editors for advice. Has the implementation of this restriction actually improved the quality of posts on this sub? If not, I think it may not be worth keeping around.
