How to cut a dance routine down to the moves children can learn
Tell Vizard Agent who has to learn the routine and how long the performance slot is. It rates the movement section by section, keeps the parts a child can memorise, and then repairs the joins, because a dance with the hard bars removed jumps between poses in a way no class can follow.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Say what the video is for. A school performance is a different brief from a highlight reel, and knowing that children will be copying the video frame by frame changes what counts as a good cut in a way no amount of technical instruction would. Give the age and the exact slot length as well.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
Roughly half the work is rating the movement for difficulty, and the other half is repairing the damage that removing the hard sections does to the flow. Cutting on the music gives a shorter video with the same impossible moves in it, so Vizard Agent maps difficulty to timestamps instead. In the session behind this article it:
- Sampled the performance video and rated the opening, middle and closing sections for their movement patterns.
- Built a timestamped review sheet and mapped the easy and the difficult moves to absolute timestamps.
- Rendered a version at three minutes thirty, trimmed it to the exact length and checked the render visually and against its waveform.
- Re-rendered with crossfades where the audio and picture joins were abrupt.
- Found a second where somebody walked through the shot and replaced it, and a pose that jumped at a join, which it bridged with movement from either side.
- Re-checked the replaced sections frame by frame before delivery.
When does this not work well?
Some routines can't be simplified by cutting. If the difficulty is spread evenly through every bar, or the choreography's meaning depends on a sequence you'd have to break, the honest answer is a new routine rather than a shorter one. Tightly choreographed music is hard too, because cuts break the counts.
Common questions
Can it keep the music whole? Yes. Vizard Agent cuts picture and sound so the track still runs continuously.
Can it slow the hard parts down instead? Yes, and it often teaches better. Ask Vizard Agent for a slowed practice version.
Will it mirror the video for the class? Yes. Tell Vizard Agent and the class can copy without reversing left and right.