Music that fits: making musical tracks fit footage without being an audio expert

Post, August, 2005 by Geoff Hufford

What do you expect from a music library? Until recently, it has been structured as a collection of musical cuts, usually delivered to users in a limited selection of fixed lengths, like :15, :30 or :60. But most video footage isn't cut in lengths of nice, round numbers. Post pros are forced to edit music pieces together with crossfades and other tricks in order to make each piece fit the scene. In essence, the video editor also has to become a music expert, spending hours editing tracks to fit the on-screen visuals.

ONE SOLUTION

This is why the recent partnership between SmartSound Software and Megatrax Music (www.megatrax.com), which was announced at NAB this past April, works. Megatrax's new collection of music called "The Scene" is the first needle-drop music library encoded with SmartSound technology. This automatically gives users multiple options for creating different track lengths. Any length necessary can be created to score their footage. This capability brings to end-users a needle-drop library that improves their workflow by reducing time spent editing music and provides many more options than traditional music libraries.

"The Scene" includes a free copy of the SmartSound Sonicfire Pro soundtrack creation software, which is the tool that allows the user to access the encoding within the music. An editor can bring a video file into the timeline and use scoring markers to define scenes. When the user chooses a track from the SmartSound-encoded library, Sonicfire Pro automatically generates several variations (different ways of editing the music) that exactly fit the duration of the selected footage.

What did SmartSound do to give "The Scene" this capability? Essentially, it was the same process that editors do when working with library music--editing the song into smaller pieces and reassembling the pieces into a new track. SmartSound's system, gives a user thousands of different, fully constructed music tracks in a fraction of the time it would take a skilled music editor to make just one. All with the assurance that the end-result is a professional-quality production.

HOW IT WORKS

When encoding "The Scene," SmartSound's music team received the full-length mix of each track from Megatrax and brought each one into SmartSound's in-house BlockAid software. As with all music libraries, the first step is to catalog and organize the music based on style, tempo, mood, instruments and other characteristics. Then the editing process begins, with BlockAid performing sound file analysis to determine the tempo and prominent in and out points in the music. The Blocker (the on-staff music editor who uses BlockAid to encode music) then works collaboratively with the tools in BlockAid to layout the form of the music. The major sections, such as verse, chorus, bridge and coda, are further subdivided into blocks that are generally a couple of measures long. The Blocker auditions each edit point and the software fine-tunes them to the precise sample where a clean edit point is found. Making dozens of precise musical edits can take hours for a person to do manually using a traditional library.

Once the track has been broken into its musical structure, the Blocker then builds a musical compatibility and usage map between the blocks. When two blocks are heard to be musically compatible, meaning that one music block flows seamlessly into the other, the Blocker will establish the link between them. The Blocker also marks some segments as appropriate beginnings or endings for musical pieces. Building flexibility into the ending section of the music is especially important, since a larger number of potential endings increases the variations possible and makes different variations sound unique. Each pair of musically-compatible blocks increases the number of variations that can be constructed. BlockAid's Variation Grid is a realtime display that tracks the Blocker's progress toward the goal of having multiple variations possible at any length.

After the encoding work is completed, a music library manager reviews it and BlockAid performs validation and quality assurance testing before the track is added to a collection of SmartSound-enabled music, like "The Scene." The Sonicfire Pro application uses the encoding information to intelligently rearrange the blocks into a new soundtrack. Sonicfire Pro even gives users guidance if they want to manually create a soundtrack by linking segment blocks they choose on the timeline.

THE RESULT

In just a few hours, SmartSound's encoding process enables the creation of over 1,400 variations from a single piece of music. Typically, there are six or more variations available at any length, as opposed to the very limited set of lengths and variety in traditional music libraries. This cannot be accomplished by working with loop-based or granularly-composed music, or by playing tricks with tempos or pitch without degrading the sound quality. SmartSound's patented encoding process and software gives post pros access to the company's years of music editing experience and the knowledge of a team of talented musicians.