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One sometimes hears jokes at trade shows about a new editing system that is "so advanced, it edits for you!" One company, Sonic Desktop, claims their software, Sonicfire Pro, does just that -- for music.
Available for Mac OS 8.5 and later (including OS X) and Windows 98 and later, the program allows you to place music on a simple one-track stereo timeline in sync with imported video. You can do this with an included music "wizard," dubbed "Maestro," that walks you through the process of choosing tracks, or you can simply drag and drop cues as you might expect. The program can import any QuickTime video for reference, provided that you have the appropriate codecs installed. Windows users need DirectX 8.0+ for full functionality. Using the software is straightforward. You simply set in and out markers on the timeline (or park the cursor where you want the music to start and set a duration later). Then Maestro will take you through a series of dialogs to help you choose the kind of music you need (Figure 1). Or, if you know exactly what you want, you can go directly to a specific cue. You then review your cue against picture. When you're satisfied, Maestro will place it in the timeline filling the length you specified, starting with the music's natural start, and ending with its natural end. The program also allows you to alter a cue's length after it is cut by dragging its out point in the timeline, and the program automatically "re-edits" the music to fit the new length (Figure 2). You can cross-fade between cues, but the interface is not particularly intuitive and there's no visual indication of fade lengths.
The software features rudimentary rubber-band-style controls for level adjustments (calibrated in percentages rather than decibels). This allows you to mix your edited music with the original production track you imported with your QuickTime video. But you can't see the production track in the timeline and you can't control its level over time.
The secret to Sonicfire Pro lies not so much in its software but in its specially prepared music libraries called "Audio Palettes." Smartsound has taken needle-drop music from such libraries as Killer Tracks, The Music Bakery and Nightingale Music and has specially formatted the tracks for use with their software. In a sense, the music is "pre-edited," in that it is broken up into "blocks" of two-measure (eight-beat) musical phrases. The software uses as many of these blocks as it needs to fill the time frame you specify. You can also play with the "blocks" by manually placing them end to end on the timeline. This works reasonably well, but editing music is not just about starting and ending -- it's just as much about how the internal structure of the music hits specific moments in the picture -- and Sonicfire Pro has no real facility for this.
The library of music is well-produced but typical of the generic needle-drop cues you might expect in a royalty-free collection -- they sound homogenized and lack the emotional edge of custom score. There are currently 43 Audio Palettes available in the library, each on a CD-ROM priced at around $129 (volume discounts bring that down as low as $90). The titles range from "American Spirit" and "Cinematic Excellence" to "Corporate Tech" and "World Beat." A full list of titles, with samples you can listen to, is available at www.smartsound.com/music.
You can also use SonicFire Pro to cut your own music, but music editors familiar with Pro Tools or Fairlight systems will find the program limited, slow and more than a little frustrating as an editing tool. If you like Sonicfire's way of looking at musical "blocks," you can set up Pro Tools' grid mode to work similarly, but with much more power. Beyond that, a real editing system simply offers far greater flexibility, ease and speed both in editing and in workflow.
The program allows you to export individual cues or the entire timeline as an AIFF, WAV or any format supported by QuickTime (Figure 3). There's no provision for an OMF export, so once you export your cues, you'll have to re-sync them to picture in your Avid, FCP or Pro
There's no way to vary speed or do pull-ups and pull-downs so you'll have to do that in Pro Tools. You can export any of the sample rates available in QuickTime (48, 44.1, 32K, etc) though you may want to export in the native 44.1, and do your conversions later in Pro Tools using the "best" setting for optimum quality.
Sonicfire is not really designed for music editors. It's aimed at video editors, directors and producers who may not have the time, inclination -- or skill -- to edit music for their projects. One can certainly imagine it being useful for corporate industrials, training films, simple educational videos and the like. But by trying to automate the work of the music editor, the program reminds us how important and deep real music editing is. Sonicfire Pro attempts to reduce the task to the chaining together of simple musical phrases, but music editing is much more than that; it's about making the internal structure of the music work with picture to tell a story, and this takes skill and human judgment. Using any professional audio workstation, a talented music editor can easily outperform this software. It's best to look at the program not as a music editing tool, but as an automatic music librarian that provides you with quickly prepared cues of a specific length. It allows people with little musical skill to create straightforward musical backgrounds with a tone and rhythm they specify. It's easy to use, and I imagine it could be useful as a sort of dynamic library or a rapid templating tool that would permit one to try out a series of musical ideas very quickly. With enough of Sonic Desktop's Audio Palettes, you'll probably have ample musical variety for most tasks. The base software retails for $349 and includes two audio palettes. If you were to add all the libraries, the total would come to around $4,000. But in reality you'd probably only buy a dozen or so, which would total roughly $1,500. Considering the royalty-free nature of the music, that's not a bad deal. |
