Picture Window

May 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Mike Levine and Dennis Miller

Cakewalk Sonar 6 Producer Edition (Win; $619)

Sonar's handling of file import and export is a cut above the rest and will be especially handy if you need to prepare files for different purposes (see Fig. 4). After you've completed your score, select Export Video and you'll find WMV, Video for Windows, and QuickTime as the available formats. Once you pick a format, you have access to an extensive set of encoding options. For example, you can change the frame rate of a file, enable a setting to automatically optimize it for downloading, and change its frame size (all the standard NTSC and PAL sizes are supported). You can also add filters to alter your video's color, adjust its brightness and contour, and more. You'll find a number of options in the same window for modifying the audio, which is a convenient touch.

Like most of the apps in this roundup, Sonar can display the individual frames of a video file and send those to an external DV device for viewing or recording. It will also show your video in a dedicated window and as single frames in its video track simultaneously. Right-clicking on the Video Preview window brings up a host of settings for customizing the video display. These include manually stretching the display to any arbitrary size, expanding it to full screen, setting the time-display format (minutes:beats:ticks, SMPTE, Frames, or None), and changing the background color. You can also adjust the resolution at which video will be displayed — a low resolution may be adequate for finding cue points and will save CPU cycles during playback. More important, you can change the time in your sequence at which the video will start to play and also set in and out points within the video file.

Sonar lets you drop markers on the fly and then lock them to specific SMPTE times. This is handy if, for instance, you need to hit a cue at a specific time in the video file and want to change the tempo of your sequence. It's also easy to import a video file without importing its preexisting audio track — just leave Import Audio Stream unchecked when you load the video. You can also have Sonar split an existing stereo audio track into separate mono files when importing.

Sonar 6's new AudioSnap feature can be used to easily align a beat or transient within a clip to hit a particular video cue. You can also use AudioSnap to fit the tempo of an audio track to match the length of a scene. In addition to just typing in a new duration for your clip, which is one of its less unique features, you can hold down the Ctrl key and drag the end of the audio clip to align with the end of the video, and Sonar will automatically change the speed of your audio without changing its pitch.

You can choose from several stretching algorithms to find the one that works best for your material (percussion, mono or polyphonic, and so on), and select either the real-time stretch or “offline” stretch function depending on the amount of stretching you're doing and the quality of output you're after.

With its robust surround features, extensive video-file support, and built-in V-Vocal VariPhrase and Perfect Space convolution reverb tools, Sonar is well equipped for a wide range of scoring tasks.

Digidesign Pro Tools HD 7.3, LE 7.3 (Mac/Win; price depends on hardware purchased)

Out of the box, the video functionality of Pro Tools HD and LE are quite different. HD offers a robust set of video- and scoring-to-picture-related features, whereas LE has very little. However, LE users can expand their capabilities significantly with the purchase of the DV Toolkit 2 software ($995), an add-on that gives them most of the same video support as is in HD. Unfortunately, DV Toolkit 2 is not compatible with Pro Tools M-Powered. The features described here apply to both Pro Tools HD and LE, except where noted.

Pro Tools imports a number of formats, including QuickTime, AVI, and MPEG. Your video opens in both a thumbnail track and a resizable video window. You get a set of basic video-editing tools, so you can cut, copy, and paste video sections right from the thumbnail track (see Fig. 5). There are two different ways to scrub your video with the Scrubber tool: scrub in the video track and the video will move with no audio sounding, and scrub in an audio track, in which case both video and audio will play.

The video track's audio is automatically displayed in its own audio track. Pro Tools' Playlist feature, which lets you have multiple nested versions (takes) of a track, is also supported for the video track. You can even have multiple video tracks, although only one can be active at a time. These would allow you to alternately view, say, two different edits of the same video with your music.

The program lets you export your finished video to a variety of QuickTime formats, supporting both PAL and NTSC, and gives you options for pull-up and pull-down (which compensate for speed changes when converting from film to video and video to film, respectively). You can also choose from a number of audio sampling rates. Pro Tools gives you flexibility with tempo, meter, and audio and video start times. The Identify Beat command lets you set the downbeat of bar 1 at any point on the timeline. The Current Time Code Position window lets you easily offset the timecode in the counter to match any burned-in timecode in your video.

One of Pro Tools' most useful features for video is Spot mode. It allows you to place events (both audio and MIDI) at precise SMPTE locations, making tasks like adding sound effects a breeze. Pro Tools also supports REX and Acid files by converting them into Region Groups, which then respond to tempo changes in the session.

Because Digidesign is owned by Avid, Pro Tools has been designed to interface with Avid products in several ways. For example, if you import an Avid video sequence into Pro Tools, you can see the Avid edits.

With a Pro Tools HD setup, you've got a top-notch industry-standard professional scoring environment. Pro Tools LE with DV Toolkit 2 offers almost as much functionality. However, with either of those options (especially HD), you will be spending more than you would with most of the other applications in this article.

Mackie Tracktion 3 (Mac/Win; Ultimate Bundle $319.99, Project Bundle $129.99)

At the time of this writing, Tracktion 3 was in the late stages of beta, and Mackie expected to release it well before this issue's press time. Our observations are based on a late beta version of the application.

Tracktion 3 has a number of video- and scoring-related features. It lets you import a QuickTime video file and open up a movie window. You can choose how big to make the window and whether or not the movie window will float. (Be aware that when you set it to float, it even floats over other programs you've opened above it.)

Tracktion 3 lets you view its ruler and counter in either bars:beats:ticks, SMPTE, or elapsed time, but you can view only one format at a time. The program offers good flexibility with meter and tempo. It supports REX, Acid, and Apple Loop files, giving you the ability to import such files and then experiment with the tempo — always a plus when scoring. It's also worth noting that Tracktion 3 Ultimate Bundle comes with an entire DVD of looped content.

Tracktion's markers (limited to a total of nine) can be displayed in the timeline or in a separate marker track (see Fig. 6), and they can be locked to absolute time. There's no way to offset the beginning of bar 1 in relation to the video, but you can set an offset for the start of the video clip in either SMPTE or bars:beats:ticks, which gives you some flexibility.

The program doesn't let you split a movie's audio file onto a separate audio track (although you can mute the movie's audio), nor can it export your finished movie and audio into a new movie file.

In its current incarnation, Tracktion doesn't have a feature set to match its larger and more expensive competitors, but for those who only dabble in scoring, it offers a lower-cost alternative.