Choosing the right music for your video is essential! Without the right music, your video cannot set itself apart from millions of visual contents freely available on the internet.
First of all, you should determine the mood. Is your video happy, sad, grand, understated, serious, or cheerful? Determining the mood will allow you to find the right tempo and genre of the music for your video.
Second thing you must bear in mind is that you shouldn’t mix too many different music styles. Switching between genres to surprise your audience or grab their attention is always a good idea but you must be very careful when doing that. Adding very different music tracks back to back in your video can confuse your viewers, make them feel alienated and even hinder you from sending across the message you want to.
Another thing you must pay attention to is the harmony: Your music and your video must be in tune. Consider each scene and what message you want to send out with these scenes. Make sure that your music complements the mood and message of the scene instead of interfering with them.
While in post production, don’t hesitate to watch your video several times and experiment with different music tracks to see which one fits better.
Consider your target audience while settling with the music. Be mindful of their taste, age, background and habits. For instance, EDM or techno might not be the best music for your video if you want to appeal to an older generation. Or country songs might not grab the attention of a more urban target audience. Pay attention to your viewers and their characteristics.
And finally, pay attention to copyrights! Almost all social media platforms have strict rules against the use of copyrighted songs. If the video you want to publish has copyrighted material in it, major platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and Twitch are most likely to remove it. Moreover, you might even get shadow banned or lose your account if you violate copyright rules more than once. That is why you must be vigilant with copyright violations.
You can use non copyrighted and royalty free songs freely in your videos. If you don’t know how to tell if a song is copyrighted, you can check PDINFO. If you want to be safe, the best way to go is visiting royalty free song libraries of Snapmuse. You can browse by mood, artist and genre to find the perfect musical match for your video.
Once you choose the music, your next step is using Adobe After Effects to incorporate the song you chose into your video.
First of all, start the program and open a new project. Choose a self explanatory name for your project so that you can find it easily when you need to. Avoid giving it a name that consists of random letters or numbers.
Then import the files you want to work on: Your video or videos, and the music files you want to insert to your video. If you cannot import your audio files to your project, check their extension: It must be .mp3.
After you are done with the import process, you are ready to edit your video and audio files. Press cmd+0 (ctrl+0 if you are on Windows) to enable the audio in timeline. Then simply drag and drop the audio files onto the composition.
If you need to adjust the audio settings, you can hit the L key twice on your keyboard to view audio waveform.
You can drag and reposition audio clip to make fine adjustments.
