Rick Gerard wrote:
Cutting music accurately to beats is usually a simple matter of math. Most music, especially music with a strong beat, runs at a specific number of beats per minute. That's usually easy to figure out.
Quite right, it seems that once you have the BPM you at least have a base for laying down markers for every beat.
As I was digging around for a solution I came across this tool: http://aescripts.com/beat-assistant/
Which seemed to be quite magical, but after playing with the trial for a bit I realized that it doesn't actually match every beat - rather it uses SoundTouch (http://www.surina.net/soundtouch/) to figure out a single number for the BPM, then just sets markers at intervals from the playhead. So I'm comfortable getting the BPM and writing a script to place the markers myself, but others may find BeatAssistant useful if you aren't.
However you said "usually that's easy to figure out," so I wonder how you do figure out the BPM? I mean using software to do it is fine for me but do you use another method?
Finally, thanks for the advice about cutting aesthetics. I agree, and I would love to have the flexibility to time my cuts more organically - but I feel like, for the reasons I outlined in my question (paragraphs 5 and 6), After Effects isn't really up to the task. Do you do this in AE when you cut to music? If so, how?