By Neil Leonard III
Learn The Art Of Film Scoring With QuickTime Movies.
 

FIG. 1: Emagic’s Logic Audio is one of several pro-level sequencers that let you synchronize QuickTime movies with music tracks.
Most professional sequencers feature the ability to display digital video with synchronized sounds and music. This lets composers and sound designers take advantage of a wide range of familiar audio tools for projects that require scoring to picture. The video format used with these high-end sequencers is almost always QuickTime, because it is by far the most powerful, flexible, and ubiquitous engine for delivering multimedia content to desktops and the Internet.

According to Apple, QuickTime 4 has been downloaded more than 50 million times and is installed on more than 100 million machines. Because the software incorporates streaming and compression technologies, it is practically the de facto industry standard for digital movies on the Web.

Cross-platform portability is one of QuickTime’s greatest strengths. It works on any PowerMac running Mac OS 7.5 or better, where it is implemented as a set of OS extensions. On PCs, the system consists of dynamically linked libraries and requires a Pentium processor, Windows 95 or later, a Sound Blaster–compatible sound card, and Microsoft’s DirectDraw and DirectSound. You can control QuickTime with Java applets, making it an ideal platform for delivering audio and video to interactive Web sites.

 So, if you aspire to be the next John Williams but don’t have the backing of a Hollywood movie studio, you might try writing scores for QuickTime video clips first (see Fig. 1). you can use the same techniques as the big shots to produce a film score that is locked to picture yet is small enough to beposted on the Web. Aside from your desktop MIDI studio, all you need is QuickTime Pro to get started.

Download
QuickTime is available as a free download from Apple’s Web site (www.apple.com/quicktime). The latest version, 4.1.2, installs the required system extensions, QuickTime Player (see Fig. 2), and an encrypted version of QuickTime Pro. You must unlock the Pro software with a code purchased from Apple for $29.99, which enables the Save and Export features in the QuickTime Player application. You can then create a video clip, write a music score for it, and export a high-quality, low-bandwidth movie for Web distribution.

 
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 Reprinted with permission from Magazine, January, 2001
© 2001, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved


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