No Experience Necessary
 Sonic Desktop’s SmartSound SonicFire Pro

By Matt Payne
 
SmartSound Sonicfire Pro from Sonic Desktop automates the creation of custom music tracks for video and multimedia projects. Designed for a broad range of users, SonicFire Pro is best for those who have little or no experience editing sound tracks.

The box says users can “create custom, professional music soundtracks for any visual project, in minutes.” Surprisingly, that claim is accurate. Sonic Desktop gets the job done by cutting the music tracks from its libraries into pieces called SmartBlocks using pointer files. The music track appears as a single file, but the pointers represent different segments as blocks that can be independently loaded and edited on a timeline. Each block can be given unique properties causing it to fade in, fade out or smoothly transition to the next block.

The interface is made up of several windows: a timeline for assembling and editing tracks, a blocks window for displaying all of the blocks making up the audio track, and a video window for viewing and playing imported video. Audio tracks can be imported directly to the timeline or individual blocks can be dragged to the timeline from the blocks window.

Users can create sound tracks with either a hands-on timeline interface or Maestro, an application that automatically builds tracks to order based on the music style selected by the user and the desired duration.

Advice from a Maestro

The box says users can ‘create custom, professional music soundtracks for any visual project in minutes.’ Surprisingly, that claim is accurate.

For those who are not musicians or experienced soundtrack editors, Maestro may well be Sonicfire Pro’s most appealing feature. There are five steps to building a track in Maestro. The first step is to select how the music will be used. The choices include a wide variety of uses such as action, background and drama. The second step is to select the style. For example, the style choices for background music will include jazzy and soundscape, among others. The user then selects the source from which the final track will be drawn, and sets the duration for the track. Several variations will be offered that meet the style and time parameters.

Once a final selection has been made, Sonicfire Pro loads it into the Timeline and the blocks window. The user can add or delete blocks as desired. The user may elect to save the file (for import into an editing application) or edit the track to a video clip in the timeline. The advantage to working in SonicFire Pro is that all the blocks that make up the finished music track remain visible and editable. Pauses can be added by creating space between the blocks.

To edit the soundtrack to a specific movie, the user must import a DV, AVI, MPEG, or QuickTime video clip. If the file was made in Maestro, chances are there is little editing to do—the audio track will be the desired length and only the sound level remains to be set. I found this function was best performed in my video editor, mostly because I was more familiar with it but also because it has tools and interactivity that SonicFire Pro does not.


Copyright © 2001 AV Video Multimedia Producer. All rights reserved.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]