Hiya, I've got to do my first bit of original music to picture - for a great short film a friend has written and directed. Those of you who are doing this kind of thing regularly using Logic (thereby keeping us on topic ;) ) - what are your top 5 tips / hints / thoughts / words of wisdom on the subject of music for film? Technical / practical or aesthetic / abstract - all welcome. I'm just looking for the benefit of some experience and a bit of inspiration really - never done this kind of thing before and it's kind of daunting... all best wishes, pk

> keeping us on topic ;) ) - what are your top 5 tips / hints / > thoughts / > words of wisdom on the subject of music for film? Technical / > practical or > aesthetic / abstract - all welcome. I'm just looking for the > benefit of > some experience and a bit of inspiration really - never done this > kind of I have a page of tips on writing to picture on my site. This is the first of a series and currently resides in the Links (miscellaneous) section. It's on the "aesthetic/abstract" side of things, more practical and technical on the way Hope it's useful PT www.petethomas.co.uk

> I've got to do my first bit of original music to picture > what are your top 5 tips As for the inspiration, it's really up to you, no recipe i can give you, sorry. But wait, i can ! Get ahold of any soundtrack cd you can possibly touch and delve *deeply* into it. Which sort of style do you and the director want to go ? Having a clear and concise communication with the director makes things tremendously easier. Have a serious dinner, talk about what you and, more importantly, what he wants to achieve with this score, how things have to be approached artistically and then work out a common musical ballpark where both of you feel comfortable to manoeuvre within. Back to the nitty gritty stuff, the single most important thing i found is having each cue (separate piece of music that starts and ends) in a separate Logic song, named with a number in front of the actual name, so they line up later in order of appearance. Then you use one 120 bpm master song where you assemble the final stereo mixes at their proper places for approval / playout to DAT / OMF export. This makes presenting your music much easier, since you don't have to worry about remixing and -muting on the fly with sweaty hands when you're really supposed to make a confident, relaxed and overall positive impression. Also it keeps the director at least a tiny bit from demanding changes *on the spot*, which is never nice for a beginner. But be at all prepared for changes, they are pretty common, and this is one further reason for using separate songs, cause fiddling with the tempo of one cue would seriously wreak havoc on all following things otherwise. Have you thought of how you'd deliver your final mixes to the dubbing stage ? Again, if you used the master song concept and the dubbing house uses ProTools, you are just one click away from exporting an OMF file which can then be easily imported into PT. How do you provide picture to sync to ? VHS ? Quicktime ? There's a detailed article where i described this here: http://studio-central.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t25&highlight Christian

The Pupkid wrote: > Those of you who are doing this kind of thing regularly using Logic (thereby > keeping us on topic ;) ) - what are your top 5 tips / hints / thoughts / > words of wisdom on the subject of music for film? Hello Pupkid, Congratulations on your gig. I'm sure you'll find it both a challenge and a thrill to write for picture. Here are a few tips in no order of importance: - meet regularly with the director in your studio. That way, you won't get too far ahead without his/her approval (and you won't waste your time writing stuff that won't get used) - go for a walk when you run out of ideas - use simple arrangements. Remember that your music is part of a great whole that includes photography and dialogue. That's already a lot for the viewer to take in, so if your music is simple, it won't steal the attention from the rest of the film - have someone else (girl/boyfriend, best friend, wife/husband) listen in to give you advice - don't give away too much of the action by having the music come in early - follow the characters' moods in your music - try to incorporate at least one live instrument. If you don't have one, add vibrato and dynamic filtering to some of your sample instruments. Good luck! Ned http://www.nedfx.com Ned Bouhalassa n e d @ n e d f x . c o m

Ned Bouhalassa wrote: > - use simple arrangements. Remember that your music is part of a great > whole that includes photography and dialogue. Ooooops! That'll teach me to type emails before breakfast!: should read. "... part of a _greater_ whole that includes..." Ned http://www.nedfx.com Ned Bouhalassa n e d @ n e d f x . c o m

> The Pupkid wrote: >> Those of you who are doing this kind of thing regularly using Logic (thereby >> keeping us on topic ;) ) - what are your top 5 tips / hints / thoughts / >> words of wisdom on the subject of music for film? small tips; Start out by writing some pieces of music which suit the mood u want to establish in a certain scene (or the whole movie), and try not to focus to much on cue-points and timing your music to the picture in the beginning. When you're satisfied with the music, just slip it under the scene, and then you can start making adjustments for particular accents and cues... This will prevent you from following the pictures too much, which generally doesn't work too well, unless you're making a tom&jerry score :-) Plus this way a lot of great interactions between music and film will appear that you wouldn't have thought of writing....and get for free! Another good idea is to slide existing pieces of music under certain scenes, to help you determin if a certain style of music really enhances a scene, or destroys the mood, before you spend 3 days on an orchestral piece, and come to the conclusion that the scene is strongest with a solo violin, or without any music at all! (speaking of which; don't be afraid of musical silence, a lot of hitchcock's most tension-full scenes are (musically) silent, and it works great!) Don't think to litterally about following 'action'scenes with action-music and slow scenes with slow music. A contrast can sometimes work so much more powerfull. A good example is a terrible attack/bombing scene in "die blechtrommel', were there's almost no 'setnoise' or soundfx, but a dramatic slow piece of classical music, really wonderful. Another good one is to determin your musical vocabulary in the sense of used instruments. It creates a great coherency (? Xcuse the english btw) if you limit yourself to just a few instruments, or just a part of an orchestra. I once saw a film where only cello's alto-s and some percussion were used. It works great, and also, a limitation like this will free up your mind a lot when writing. Goodluck, it's fun to do Cheers, Arvid

I finally did my first proper AV project using 5.5 under OSX today. 2.5 minute video came in on VHS and had to get it into PowerPoint. Since my guy who usually does this isn't around anymore ( thanks economy!) and I needed a quick turnaround, it's up to the boss (ie me) to do it. So, transfer VHS into a Sony DV deck. Then import from the DV deck into iMovie (v3, came out last week). It is industrial video, ambient sound and narration. There is one video/audio dropout of 3 seconds, and 2 sections where the ambient noise drops out. I clip out the dead 3 second and use a dissolve transition to smooth the video...that's fine. I add some production music bed under the intro and outro because it was really dry otherwise...that's fine and iMovie has gotten better with audio (multiple tracks and you can rubber-band volume easily. Fixing the missing ambient sound seemed like a job for Logic though. So I had iMovie extract the audio, and that resulted in 2 audio files (remember I had to split the original capture to get rid of the dropout). So I pull these two files into the audio window and all is good. I listen and they are too fast, so I open sample edit and change the sample rate from 32K (?) to 44.1K. Sounds normal now. I toss the files into the arrange window and start to work. Back in the sample edit window I find a few stretches of fairly even ambient sound and highlight them, then create new regions. I toss those onto arrange on another track under the dead spots. A cross fade fixes the transition between the 2 original clips, and I'm looking good. I add my bed to another track and set the automation to properly duck the narration and ambient audio. Finally, I bounce to disk and put the resulting aiff file back into iMovie, and turn off all the other audio. All is well and good until I notice that I'm a second or so off by the end of the video. It isn't a killer because there are no lips to sync to, but I'd like to figure out where I went wrong. I know that FCP has some audio sync issues (and hence I'd assume the iMovie also suffers), but I figure it was probably something systemic (resample or drift or edit placement or ?). That being said, I figure there are better workflow ideas for doing audio for video in Logic. The v4 Manual has no mention of video. I did pull in the video so I could watch it, but since I was coming from multiple clips there were sync issues there too. So I suppose I do all my video edits, then render a new file, then extract that audio to work with, then go back into iMovie, replace the audio, and render again? Any ideas or pointers to relevant web sites/tutorials welcome.

--- todd <todd@...> wrote: > I finally did my first proper AV project using 5.5 under OSX today. 2.5 > minute video came in on VHS and had to get it into PowerPoint. > All is well and good until I notice that I'm a second or so off by the > end of the video. I could be wrong, but I thought that DV always had to be 48k, and 29.97 framerate. First thing I would try, set up Logic that way originally, before you import anything. > That being said, I figure there are better > workflow ideas for doing audio for video in Logic. I use a canopus dv converter into imovie, and it works pretty well, but coming from VHS, it's definately not top quality. If I were you, I would try to import audio and video in seperate passes, and organize everything in logic, as opposed to iMovie. When it's all how you want it, bounce it as a single audio file. If at all possible, get a copy of the video as QT or on beta. VHS into iMovie back onto VHS can get ugly. P.S. Library music ?!? How could you ? Dave Lewis

> So I suppose I do all my video edits, then render a new file, then > extract that audio to work with, then go back into iMovie, replace the > audio, and render again? > After rereading your post, this does seem the way to go. I haven't noticed sync issues between iMovie and logic when working this way, most recently with a five minute video, which stayed frame accurate according to to burned-in timecode. Dave Lewis

On Tuesday, February 4, 2003, at 07:52 AM, David Lewis wrote: > P.S. Library music ?!? How could you ? > Dave Lewis <looking ashamed> well my excuse is that this project was dumped on my desk at 9:30am yesterday and I had to get it done by the afternoon (along with all the other stuff I usually do). With no instruments in my office, grabbing a Hollywood Edge library was the best I could muster. Besides, I need to get my money's worth out of all those discs... Todd

On Tuesday, February 4, 2003, at 07:52 AM, David Lewis wrote: > I use a canopus dv converter into imovie, and it works > pretty well, but coming from VHS, it's definately not > top quality. If I were you, I would try to import > audio and video in seperate passes, and organize > everything in logic, as opposed to iMovie. When it's > all how you want it, bounce it as a single audio file. > If at all possible, get a copy of the video as QT or > on beta. VHS into iMovie back onto VHS can get ugly. We shoot everything in DVCam, with the occasional BetaSP archive stuff. The problem is that groups we collaborate with will often bring a VHS copy and want footage from it ("but it's S-VHS...that's good, right?"). I've got a JVC consumer deck with both VHS and miniDV built in. It is quick and convenient, but the quality of the A/D conversion isn't so good. The Canopus unit looks like a good inexpensive way to go. I'd prefer that we just got digital content to work with...maybe next year. Todd

just wanted to say thanks to all those who gave their thoughts and suggestions re. writing music to picture. I'm doing it this week and will let you know how I get on. thanks again + best wishes, pk