Producer/Duets

Written by DeusExMachina

Producer is pretty fun to play with, especially if there is a track that you want, but that does not exist. Unfortunately, it is very much a work in progress, so there are still some things that are difficult to do, and others that are pretty much impossible. That said, there are many ways to hack Producer to get results that you could not otherwise get. Some are tedious, and take a lot of work. Creating duets using multiple font colours, though, is one of the easier things.

I shall assume for the purposes of this tutorial that you are getting your lyrics into Producer using KTP. In KTP just time the lyrics as if there were only one person singing all parts. When you are satisfied, with your timings, import the .ktp file into kJams. Then select the file in the browser and chose Producer from the Advanced menu.

After you import, and edit the timings as per the other tutorials, the next thing you need to do is add a bit of colour. Producer is very conservative in how many colours it uses out of the limited CD+G colour pallet, so you should have a pretty wide open field in which to play. If you are using graphics, this can be reduced somewhat, but can be made more flexible by proper placement of pictures, and adding extra pallet switches. First, find a place in the CD+G stream timeline after where the Producer creates your pallets, and before any graphics you might add. You will see the pallet in the center of the Inspector window. They are created in a two CD+G block set, load CLUT Lo, and Load CLUT Hi. There are usually only a few colours, since again, kJams is conservative as to the number used. So you need to make some more colours. Click in one of the unused colour boxes in the pallet list in the Inspector for the pallet block. (Unused blocks are black. Be careful, though, since if the CD+G uses a black background, one of the black squares will be that background colour. If you change it and the background changes, just change it back to black or use ⌘Z undo, and select a different pallet block.) Use the OSX colour selector to pick a new colour. (If you want different sweep colours, repeat this procedure on a separate colour box.)

Next, find the first block of text whose colour you want to change. This should be on one of the "story board" screens that show the next full block of lyrics. Select all the text blocks that you want to change, and then drag a connector between the Text colour box in the element level section of the Inspector (bottom left) to the colour in the pallet you want the text to be. (If you chose an alternate sweep colour for your new text, drag a connector between the sweep colour and this new colour in the pallet.) Move to the next story board with text whose colour you wish to change and repeat.

You will have to repeat the editing of the colour pallet for every storyboard block, so it is a good idea to use an easy to find colour in the colour picker. If you add a graphic, remember that you will need to fix you pallet by adding back your colours at the next storyboard. You can make this easier by just copying and pasting the CLUT blocks from the original edited pallet to each new one. Use the up/down arrow keys to advance to the right storyboard, and hit ⌘V to trick the "copy calipers" (Sorry, I have to invent all these new terms here!) into moving to the current block. Expand it to include the two CD+G set, and use ⌘C to copy. Move to the next block where you want to copy your edited pallet, and hit ⌘V to reset the caliper position, and ⌘V again to perform the paste.

Takes about 2-5 minutes to go through a song and change the colours. You can use as many as you want, up to 15 (16 colours in the palette, minus one for the sweep text colour. The standard appears to be blue for males (or part 1) pink for females (or part 2) and green for lyrics that are sung by both parts. I have done one with as many as six.

The Compositing Way

Alternately, you can reproduce the dual simultaneous sweeps you see in some duets, where the two singers are singing different parts at the same time. This takes a bit more work, and requires some additional software, but can be done using the following method:

1. Create a ktp track for just the lyrics for one part, two or three lines per page
2. Create a separate ktp track with lyrics for just the second part, just like above.
3. In Producer, create a track for the first ktp file. Open the media stream info by selecting "Get Media Info…" from the File menu, select "Top" from "Page Vertical", and make sure all your lyrics are in the top half of the screen, and colour them the way you prefer.
4. Select "Transparent Video" from the Video menu.
5. After you are satisfied with the track, chose "Export>"Selection as QuickTime…" from the File menu, and select the highest resolution format your system will reasonably support, in terms of render time. Export the track.
6. Repeat this procedure for the second ktp track, this time using bottom justification, and choosing a different colour. (There is no need to make the video transparent.) Export as above.
7. Next, open in a video editor that allows compositing. Here are a few free ones for OSX, you can also use After Effects
8. Overlay the first video on top of the second one. If everything is going according to plan, the first track should have the background saved as a transparent alpha channel, so the second track should show through.
9. Chose one of the tracks to provide the audio, and mute the other. Alternately, you can add a third track, that is just the original audio that kJams uses, and mute the first two tracks.
10. When you are satisfied with the results, export to your final format (probably lower resolution than your original tracks).
11. Revel in your professional looking, dual simultaneous sweeping, multi-colour duet (or trio, quartet, etc.).