I’d like to open this topic up for those of us who score to video everyday in our DAWs. I’m a working professional film composer (30+ years).
Like many of you, when scoring to picture, I work exclusively in my DAW. I use Dorico for sketching ideas, orchestration, and notation. I’d love to do more film composition work in Dorico – but it’s not quite practical yet. It’s getting so close!
What feature is keeping Dorico from becoming the most powerful film composition tool on the planet? "
Tactile Video Positioning"
What do I mean by this?
Every DAW allows video to be placed visually (as a stream of thumbnails) anywhere in the timeline. The user can slide the video back or forward on the timeline with the mouse, visually, line it up with a particular sync point in the music , then lock it down. We can drag trim the beginning and end points of a video too, visually, just as if it were an audio track. It takes seconds to reposition a video against the music and try it in a different place.
Why is this essential to film composers?
When working in film and TV, the picture is changing daily. The days of starting a score with ‘locked picture’ are long gone. These days, film composers are composing steadily throughout the video editing process. This means we’re always re-working cues to fit picture changes. i.e. The first video cut we begin composing to is typically a 'Rough Assembly" which is always 150% too long. A week or two later we might receive a ‘Rough Cut’, then perhaps ‘Rough Cut 2’, then a ‘Test Screening Cut’ then a ‘2nd Test Screening Cut’, then a ‘Fine Cut’ then a ‘Pre-Lock’, etc… the list goes on and on for weeks.
Dorico is not practical for working with video (yet) in the professional world. Changing a ‘sync start’ frame of a video, or adjusting a frame ‘offset’ is virtually meaningless in my world. When I get new picture, I don’t know how the music I’ve already written will be affected until I see it against the picture. I don’t have a sync reference anymore. I may not even have TC burn-in on the new video. I need to be able to drop the new video in, grab it, and position it around until I discover an internal sync point that allows me to salvage the best parts of what I’ve already written. From there, I can work backwards and forwards to conform the rest of the cue to fit the new picture. No one cares how well the composition may have worked with the old picture. All that matters is how it works to the new, current picture.
Tactile Video Positioning is the most important feature a film composer could possibly hope for within Dorico. This new feature alone would put Dorico head-and-shoulders above all its competitors.
Thanks for listening.