Picture Window

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

MOTU Digital Performer 5.11
(Mac; $795)

When it comes to the sheer number of audio-for-picture features, Digital Performer (DP) is the hands-down winner. It's got what you need for everything from adding music to a video destined for your Web site to scoring a major TV show or Hollywood movie.

When you import a video file, a separate Movie window opens. The Movie window has a Mini-menu that offers options for FireWire video output, window size, copying the movie's audio to its own track, and more. You can also enable an option called Chase Graphical Edits, where the video transport jumps to whatever point you're editing in a graphical display. The Movie window has its own scrollbar at the bottom, from which you can control the transport, and it has handy arrow-shaped buttons that move the video forward or backward by one frame.

One limitation of DP's Movie window is that there's no option for it to float, so if you don't have a second monitor or at least a large screen, you may find yourself having to constantly recall it from under other editing windows. According to MOTU, a floating Movie window will be included in a future release.

In addition to the Movie window, you also get a thumbnail video track in the Sequence Editor. This track can be resized just like the MIDI and audio tracks, and you can even adjust the movie start time from right in the Sequence Editor.

Not only can DP's markers be locked to absolute time or remain in their relative song positions, but they're also visible in every edit window and extend vertically through each editing surface. This makes it really easy to drag events right up to them.

Between the aforementioned movie-start time, the very flexible tempo and meter control available in the Conductor Track, and DP's unique Song and Chunk structure — which allows you to have numerous sequences (each with its own SMPTE start time) nested in a single file — you get tons of flexibility for manipulating the critical variables in a scoring situation. For instance, each sequence (Chunk) can reference the same movie or its own separate movie, so users can organize multiple cues in a single DP project document.

DP has a unique feature called Find Tempo (see Fig. 7), which makes the process of figuring out a tempo that works with your cue a whole lot easier. After creating and locking your markers, you enter parameters such as the tempo range, how many frames early or late is acceptable for each hit (marker), and an acceptable range of offsets for the movie start time. The program then calculates a large number of possible tempos and shows you which ones come closest to hitting all your markers. The tempo list updates in real time as you make adjustments to the various parameters.

DP is the only application to generate its own visual film-scoring cues. You can set the program to generate — and output to FireWire or to the Movie window — streamers, punches, and flutters, which are particularly useful for scoring sessions involving live musicians (such visual cues are de rigueur in Hollywood orchestral scoring sessions). They can be helpful for cueing the solo home recordist as well. DP's programmable click can even be set up to output a visual click (using punches). All the visual cues can be included in the exported QuickTime movie. You can choose to export the entire movie or a selected section.

DP's unmatched quantity of music-for-picture features, coupled with its strong all-around feature set, makes for a very capable, professional, and self-contained scoring environment.

Sony Acid Pro 6 (Win; $399.96 boxed, $374.96 download)

Sony Acid (see Fig. 8) is best known for its loop-assembly and tempo- and pitch-shifting features, some of which make it particularly well suited for scoring to picture. It supports a single video track, which can contain only one video clip, but you can easily move the video clip to any start point in your project and set in and out points by dragging on the clip's ends. You can't, however, extend the clip past its original length by having it loop, as you can with audio and MIDI clips.

Acid supports a fair number of frame rates, including those used with 16 mm and 35 mm film, and though you can easily move audio clips to line up with points in your video, there's no way to automatically snap an audio clip to a SMPTE start time. You can preview your video on an external monitor and change several aspects of the dedicated video-preview window, such as whether it displays square pixels, used when displaying video on a computer monitor, or nonsquare pixels, as seen on a TV screen.

Acid's Time Markers are the key to its scoring capabilities. Unlike a standard position marker, a Time Marker stays locked to a certain SMPTE time even if the tempo of the music changes. Using the Adjust Tempo To Match Marker feature, you can force Acid to automatically adjust your soundtrack's tempo to ensure that key points in the music align with a scene in your video. For example, if you have an audio event in the middle of your third measure that must occur on frame 2,017, put your cursor at the start of the audio event and drop a Time Marker at frame 2,017, and Acid will change the tempo of your music so the event occurs at the correct frame.

Like some others in this roundup, Acid allows you to import a video file with or without an existing soundtrack, and then save the video with a new soundtrack. The included loop library will give you a lot of raw material to use in your scores. Sony continues to improve Acid's MIDI features, and with luck, you'll find all the MIDI tools you need.

Acid is missing many of the audio-editing features of its sibling Sound Forge, but either standalone or particularly in combination with that program, it is a very robust environment for scoring to picture.

Steinberg Cubase 4 (Mac/Win; $999.99) and
Steinberg Nuendo 3 (Mac/Win; $2,499)

Cubase's and Nuendo's video- and scoring-to-picture-related features are, for the most part, very similar. As a result, we'll cover both programs in a single section and point out where there are differences.

Both Cubase (see Fig. 9) and Nuendo give you a high-level, professional tool set for composing music to picture. Import a video to the Media Pool and drag it to a track, and a floating QuickTime window pops up, as does a video thumbnail track. For the latter, you can choose Snap Thumbnails, which ensures that the thumbnail track will be frame accurate in relation to the transport. You can also opt to show frame numbers (starting from 0).

Rudimentary video editing is also available, letting you cut and paste your video (or videos) at will. Both Cubase and Nuendo offer more than one way to scrub audio and video, including the Jog Wheel, a rotating circular control on the Transport Panel. Using the Jog Wheel, you can scrub or press buttons to move forward or backward one frame at a time.

Markers in both programs can be viewed in either a separate marker window or the dedicated Marker track. In the Marker window, you can view your markers' positions in bars:beats:16th notes:ticks, timecode, elapsed time, samples, or a user-definable frame rate. In both programs, you can jump to a marker position by clicking next to it in the Marker window.

Cubase and Nuendo give you a multitude of ways to offset the start points of the video and audio. One method is through the Bar Offset feature in the Project Setup window, which lets you slide the entire starting point (of both audio and video) ahead by a specified number of measures. Set Timecode At Cursor makes it easy to synchronize your timecode start point with what's on your video's SMPTE burn window (if you have one). Both programs also give you total control of tempo and meter.

For putting together a tempo map, the Time Warp feature lets you graphically drag the timeline to match specific events, and when you do, the program changes tempo accordingly. It must be applied subtly if you want a natural-sounding track, but it can be very helpful for creating a tempo map that fits your hit points.

If you want to combine your newly recorded audio with the video track, the process is a bit more involved than in some other programs. First you have to mix your audio down. Then you choose the Replace Audio In Video File option. The program will prompt you to select the video file and then the audio file, at which point it will mix them together. The advantage is that your video stays in the same format it was imported in.