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MillimeterEdit Review: VideoHelper and Sony Creative Software Quartet
Jul 1, 2008 12:00 PM, Reviewer: Gary Eskow
New possibilities for production music.
VideoHelper offers the Look and Load search engine to help you locate the cues that will serve your needs from the company's catalog of sliceable audio tracks.
Constantly expanding libraries can occupy a lot of virtual real estate, so VideoHelper will deliver to qualified clients its entire catalog preloaded onto an 80GB hard drive. Also included on this drive is a search engine, Look and Load, that the company developed to make its database searchable for the cues that will serve your needs most effectively.
Let's put VideoHelper to work and see what these .wav files have to offer. Although I have some video clips on my hard drive, I decided to create an imaginary scene that would that would suit the aggressive personality that characterizes much of the VideoHelper catalog.
My scene opens with a wide shot that zooms to a closeup of our hero, Gary Peskow — a dashing figure with bulging muscles. To score the scene, I first loaded track 11 (“Shell Shock”) from the VideoHelper Overkill disc. The first hit point, where Peskow delivers a thoroughly convincing thumbs up directly into the camera's lens, occurs at the 26-seconds, 12-frames point. Cutting the track at the :30 point, I then used the Time Stretch function of Steinberg Cubase 4 to compress the audio to match the picture.
“Cluster,” another track from the Overkill CD, made a nice transition to the next scene. I deleted the opening :30 of this track and crossfaded the two audio clips. All the Overkill tracks that I worked with blended nicely with one another. In fact, when I imported tracks from two other VideoHelper discs — Pop Smear and Factsploitation — I found that while they had unique personalities, their overall concepts and recording techniques made it easy to blend cuts from all three CDs into each other.
There's a lot of energy in the VideoHelper discs, as well as interesting figures that can be lifted and used as motifs. For example, after importing track 2 from Overkill (“Incident Wave”), I edited out everything but a quirky four-beat synth riff. If I had a repeating visual motif that matched the emotion of this figure and synced it in at the appropriate frames, it would feel as though a composer had tailored music specifically for that visual.
VideoHelper is not, of course, the only library to offer content as waveforms that can be ripped and manipulated. However, a few qualities put this series of discs on your must-consider list: the musicality of the compositions, the way they interact with one another, and the obvious emphasis on easy editing with which these libraries were created.
Over the last several years, it has been a mantra of this column to point out the various ways that you, the esteemed videographer who may lack musical training but is nonetheless capable of using new technologies to great effect, can become more active in the creation of the audio tracks that accompany your work. VideoHelper is an excellent example of a company that understands the changes that the industry is undergoing. With these catalogs, you can integrate the company's creative talents with your own.
Sony Creative Software Quartet
Would you like to be a bit more creative and mix and match audio loops to develop precisely timed music beds to accompany your spots and videos? If so, Sony's four new loop libraries, aptly named Quartet, may be right up your alley.
Billed as an “Artist Integrated loop library,” Quartet includes guitarist Parthenon Huxley's Six-String Orchestra, Matt Fink: StarVu Session Keys, Tony Franklin: Not Just Another Pretty Bass, and drummer Siggi Baldursson's The Best of Siggi Baldursson: The Drum Loops.
All of the libraries contain 15 folders worth of loops. The concept is simple: drag and drop loops from any folder onto an audio track, and they should work with loops from like-numbered folders.
After reading the press release, which says that the Quartet line works with any “programs that support the .wav file format,” I dragged files onto four stereo audio tracks in Steinberg Cubase 4. The experiment was a disaster. The tempo and pitch information did not pass successfully from Sony's Acid programming into Cubase — and as a result, several two-bar loops had, for example, a length of 11 beats, and it was impossible to get bass and guitar loops to play in the same key.
Fortunately, everything changed once I downloaded and installed the free version of Sony's own digital audio workstation (DAW), Acid XPress. Sony pretty much set the bar for products that independently address pitch and tempo. Ignoring a few products from other manufacturers — Ableton Live is one — Sony still leads the pack. If you're in the market for a DAW, it would be in your interest to check out the newly released Acid Pro 6. It's a fully functional audio/MIDI environment that may be just what you're looking for.
Acid XPress is, as you would expect, a limited version of the full product. It does allow you to create up to 10 audio tracks, and that was more than enough to let me take Quartet for a spin. I'm happy to report that the libraries operated flawlessly in their home environment.
For starters, I opened the number 14 folders of all four instruments' libraries and auditioned loops within the Acid browser. It was easy to hear which piano grooves would lock up easily with Telecaster guitar hooks, and the same goes for the bass parts. Almost any drum loop will sound good with the other material in your folders. The performances are of a high quality, and they are released as 24-bit, 44.1kHz files that have been recorded well.
The information that was missing when I opened the files in Cubase 4 was all available inside Acid XPress, and no audio problems occurred when I repitched the melodic and harmonic material by half an octave or so in either direction. As you would expect with Acid files, the flexibility of the tempos was excellent.
Many of the parts within the individual instrument folders complemented each other nicely, and with just a little experimentation, anyone with good ears will be able to develop arrangements. Given the tempo flexibility of these files — at least when used within the Acid environment — creating songs that match the length of your scenes should be an easy assignment.
Programs such as the highly popular SmartSound Sonicfire Pro 4.5 constitute the highest hurdle for a product such as Quartet. These applications cull from a database of song structures that can be cobbled together in a malleable fashion, and they have their attractions. But a set of loop libraries that can be combined with a user's MIDI performances also has its advantages. If you have soft synths and samplers in your rig, it's easy to process individual tracks or add sound effects and musical elements to the data that Quartet provides.
The usefulness of Quartet would have been enhanced if Sony had included hits and stings in each of the folders; these would let the user create hard endings to arrangements. As things stand, you'll have to fade out the endings of the audio files you build.
Do you need Quartet? Taken together, these libraries do not constitute the be-all and end-all of scoring tools. On the other hand, if you're looking to give yourself as many options as possible in order to do inhouse audio post, Quartet could well be an important addition to your arsenal.
bottomline
Company: VideoHelper www.videohelper.com
Product: VideoHelper, ScoreHelper, and Modules
Assets: Pay-as-you-use pricing model, well-composed tracks written with :30 commercials, editing, and looping in mind.
Caveats: Not built strictly for looping programs.
Demographic: Professional videographers needing personalized audio tracks.
PRICE: Varies by license
bottomline
Company: Sony Creative Software www.sonycreativesoftware.com
Product: Quartet
Assets: Well-recorded loops that integrate easily with each other, excellent pitch and tempo flexibility.
Caveats: No hits or stings, the music you develop is limited to the personalities of the four instrumentalists, I experienced problems while using the loops in Steinberg Cubase 4.
Demographic: Film and video professionals looking to keep audio work inhouse.
PRICE: $99.95 (Parthenon Huxley's Six-String Orchestra); $99.95 (Matt Fink: StarVu Session Keys); $99.95 (Tony Franklin: Not Just Another Pretty Bass); $59.95 (The Best of Siggi)
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.