Picture Window

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

Although their video and scoring capabilities are mostly similar, the much-more-expensive Nuendo (which is intended more for postproduction environments) has a more robust feature set. For instance, Nuendo offers Insert Into Project At Timecode Position, a command that's handy for adding effects (in Cubase you can insert events at the cursor position, which is almost as useful). When you activate Nuendo's Edit mode, you can drag an event to any location in the timeline, and the video display will follow it in real time. It makes placing events at specific locations really easy. Nuendo also gives you pull-up and pull-down commands for working with projects originally in film, and it offers a lot more external hardware support options.

Overall, Cubase and Nuendo both offer a comprehensive tool set for professional video-and-film scoring work. Either program is a solid choice, but unless you're planning to do a lot of postproduction work, Cubase should give you all the functionality you need at less than half the price of Nuendo.

It's a Wrap

Deciding which sequencer to use for your audio-for-picture projects depends a lot on both the nature of the work and your budget. If you're doing only occasional Web-related video scoring, you may be able to get by with one of the less expensive programs. However, if you have the budget to buy one of the full-featured sequencers (Pro Tools, Logic Pro, Digital Performer, Cubase, Nuendo, or Sonar), you won't regret it. The control and flexibility that those programs give you is a necessity in the high-pressure world of professional scoring.

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Senior Editor Mike Levine (www.mikelevine.com) has scored many national commercials, and has written music for CNN and the History Channel. Associate Editor Dennis Miller is a composer and animator. Check out his work at www.dennismiller.neu.edu.

SIDEBARS

MIX TO PIX

Though a digital audio sequencer is clearly the best tool for scoring to picture, dedicated multitrack audio editors can be very useful if you're using precomposed music (for example, from a production library). In fact, several such programs include helpful features for working with video.

Adobe Audition (Win; $349) has a terrific feature called Link Multitrack sessions that lets you bounce a multitrack audio mix down as a stereo file for export to Premiere or After Effects, which are both part of the Production Studio bundle that Audition comes in. (Audition can also be purchased as a standalone application.) If you then need to change anything in the mix, you can open the stereo file in Premiere or After Effects and it will split back out to a multitrack version in Audition. All the programs in the bundle can access the included Adobe Bridge, which is an excellent media-assets manager.

If you want to match the duration of an audio clip to a scene in your video, you can enable Audition's time-stretching option in the audio clip's properties, and then manually drag the clip's edge to the beginning or end of the scene. You can also set markers at the boundaries of the scene, then enable snapping to markers to make aligning the audio and video even easier.

Magix Samplitude 9 Professional (Win; $1,099) supports a large number of SMPTE time displays, including standard video rates (NTSC and PAL) as well as two common film rates: 40 frames per feet (used for 16 mm) and 16 frames per feet (used for 35 mm). It can import the most common video formats (AVI, MPEG, QT, and WMV) but can export video only in AVI format. Among its features is the ability to watch your video file update in real time as you change the start time of an audio clip. This lets you see exactly where in the video the clip will be placed. Samplitude 9 ships with Magix's Movie Editor, a very capable multitrack video editor.

Although Steinberg's WaveLab 6 (Win; $699.99) may not have the reputation of its sibling Nuendo when it comes to audio for picture, it's still quite useful. You can move video clips anywhere in the dedicated video track and change the clip's start and end points. You can also split a clip repeatedly and move the parts around at will. The program lets you choose from a number of timecode formats and will even display increments as small as hundredths of a frame.

WaveLab's Time Stretch To Cursor feature is especially handy. It lets you change the duration of an audio clip to match the length of a video clip. WaveLab can also export all markers in a project as a text list, which could be useful to take to a spotting session with your film's director.
— Dennis Miller

COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT: DAVID LAWRENCE

David Lawrence is on a roll. This past year he composed the original score and cowrote one of the songs for the hit movie High School Musical (Disney, 2006), and scored the movie Cheetah Girls 2 (Disney, 2006) as well as CBS TV's hit series Jericho. As a composer in the Hollywood trenches, he experiences the pressures of the big-time scoring world daily.

Lawrence, a MOTU Digital Performer user, appreciates that program's wealth of scoring- and video-related features. “It will act as a cruise control for any composer who likes everything mapped out,” he says. “All you have to do is start putting in the notes. Personally, I love to look at music much more organically than that; it is a question of subdividing tempos, and taking half measures and quarter measures, and making things sort of work because they're sort of organic that way.”

Depending on the situation, Lawrence will use various methods to figure out tempos. “Sometimes I'll look at a cue and I'll go, ‘Okay, I'm feeling 68 beats per minute. And then here I'm going to change it to 72, and over here I'm going to ritard it, and so forth.’ So you build your tempo track after you've played around with it for a while.”

Other times, he takes a different approach. “There are cues that you just can't map out. They just flow, they just are. And you have to just kind of free-flow it, look at it, respond to the film, and play.” He uses DP's Tap Tempo feature and establishes a tempo map to fit a rubato piano part he played to the picture. “And now you put your entire orchestra behind it, so anything that needs to be tweaked, or mildly quantized, or just edited or fixed or nudged is now on a perfectly working tempo map,” he says.

Lawrence gives a tip for tapping in a tempo, one that will work in DP or any sequencer with a similar feature: don't tap in quarter notes, but rather use a subdivided tempo, usually eighth or 16th notes. “You can actually follow your performance, because it's much easier to subdivide than it is to do quarter notes at slow tempos,” he says.

Because deadlines are always so tight for composers, Lawrence has learned to work really fast. “For better or for worse — and sometimes it's for worse — many producers and directors and companies think that you can get everything done now in an hour. And it's impossible, it's unfair, and it's cruel, but if you don't do it, somebody else will get that job,” he says. “The best advice I can give anybody is, as you get familiar with your sequencer, get away from the mouse and learn as many shortcut commands at the keyboard as you can. It really, truly saves hours in your day.”
— Mike Levine

COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT: CHRIS JORDAO

Chris Jordao is a staff composer at Big Foote Music and Sound (www.bigfoote.com), a busy music-production company based in New York City. Jordao, along with the other composers at Big Foote, uses Apple Logic Pro for his scoring work.

Jordao explains the work flow on a typical TV-commercial score. “The client sends us the picture, and it's not necessarily a QuickTime movie; sometimes it's a DV file,” he says. “There are multiple formats that they send us. We have a guy here that cuts the movie to 2 seconds before the first frame of the picture, which would be 00:59:58:00.”

Jordao then sets the Movie Start parameter at the bottom of Logic's movie window to 00:59:58:00, ensuring that the first frame of the picture will be at 01:00:00:00. “It's pretty standard here,” he says, “so we always know that our sessions are going to have that starting point.”

Once that's set up, Jordao can experiment with the tempo and SMPTE start time of the music to see how various combinations work with the picture. In Logic, both these variables are located in the Tempo List window. “Sometimes we want to have the movie start a little later, to make it hit the picture better to the music, so we play around with that,” he says.

According to Jordao, he'll often use Logic's markers as well, locked to absolute time. “Since we work in a 30-second format all the time, I'll put markers at 0 seconds and 30 seconds, so I have a clear view of how many bars I have for a track, and if it [the tempo] is going to fit my needs.”

He'll also frequently use the markers to outline the hit points. “That's an important thing too,” he explains. “Each composer here will work slightly different. Some will rely more on the markers, some less. I use the markers a fair amount.”

But Jordao doesn't get too wrapped up in all the sequencing features. “I try to keep Logic as just an intuitive program for me,” he says. “I probably only use about 50 percent of what it can do — I just want to have the music come through.”
— Mike Levine

VIDEO-SCORING FEATURES COMPARED

	Acid Pro 6	Cubase 4/Nuendo 3	Digital Performer 5.11	GarageBand 3	Live 6	Logic Pro 7.2	Pro Tools HD/LE 7.3	Sonar 6 Producer Edition	Tracktion 3
Cut/Copy/Paste Video		X			X		X	X
Display SMPTE	X	X	X			X	X	X
Export Movie and New Audio	X	X	X	X		X	X	X
Extract Audio from Video File	X	X	X	X	X	X	X	X
File Formats Imported	AVI, MOV, MPEG, SWF*, WMV	AVI, DV, QT, WMV**	DV, MPEG, QT	AVI, DV, MPEG, QT	AVI, DV, MPEG, QT	AVI, DV, MPEG, QT	AVI, MPEG, QT	AVI, MOV, MPEG, WMV	QT
File Formats Exported	AVI, MOV, MPEG, RMV, WMV	AVI, DV, QT, WMV**	QT	QT		QT	QT	AVI, MOV, WMV
Markers: Lock to Absolute Time	X	X	X			X	X	X	X
Auto Move Audio to Video Frame Start		X	X	X		X	X	X	X
Notation Editing		X	X			X		X (limited)
Offset Music Start	X	X	X		X	X	X	X
Offset Video Start	X	X	X		X	X	X	X	X
Output Video to FireWire	X	X	X			X	X	X
Offset SMPTE Display		X	X			X	X
Rerender Video in New Format	X			X				X
Surround Capable	X	X	X			X	X	X
Visual Cues			X
*SWF = Flash. **Windows versions only.