I need to make scrolling score videos pretty regularly, and I wish Dorico could help me produce them – basically I’d like Galley View, except the playhead stays centered on the screen (i.e. the music scrolls but the playhead is stationary), plus I’d love to see Dorico’s optimized spacing. (As I understand it, in Galley View some of the spacing isn’t applied.)
Assuming this wasn’t added in Dorico 4 (I haven’t learned about all the new features yet), I’d love to log it as a future feature request. And meanwhile, does anyone have any clever tips for producing scrolling score videos within Dorico’s current feature set?
I appear to be one of the few users who would really value having an in-built function in Dorico that would quickly and easily produce quality scrolling score videos to share on platforms such as YouTube. I mentioned this in this Forum some time back and was told by the Dorico team that this feature was not a priority.
In my case, besides works notated in Dorico 5, I have a considerable backlog of pieces notated in Sibelius 7.5 which I’d like to complete and post as scrolling score videos. I was therefore intrigued when a colleague who has switched over entirely to Dorico sent me a scrolling score video of his latest orchestral piece. When I asked him how he had created it, he suggested I take a deep breath and then detailed the steps he took:
From Dorico: Export an MP3 of the playback.
From Dorico: Print the score to a PDF with screen-shape pages.
Export the PDF to JPEG images, one per page.
Load the MP3 into video-making software (he uses Vegas Movie Studio, but the procedure would be similar with others), a few seconds in from the start, to allow for opening titles
Load each page in at the appropriate time.
Add opening and closing titles, and movement titles too.
Render the video.
While I have all due admiration for his time, expertise and patience in going through the multiple hoops above, life is rather too short for this to be a standard solution for producing scrolling score videos with Dorico.
This leaves me with the unwelcome option of continuing to work with Sibelius 7.5 on multiple pieces, knowing that I can produce scrolling score videos simply, quickly and easily. Can I therefore renew my plea for the early introduction of a scrolling score video function in Dorico?
This feature remains an important unaddressed one for me. Print publishing, while still alive, is eventually going to be eclipsed by digital forms of score display. I can imagine there must be thousands of Dorico users who would love to be able to easily publish their scores to YouTube, and currently, there are only lo-tech static ways of doing so.
My quick & dirty procedure takes only as much time as playing the score itself plus about 10-15 minutes. Using that other suggested alternative way (exporting images of each page then aligning them) takes a lot more time and fiddly work.
I would like this too, but for now, I have been doing a workaround for a daily composition project where basically change my layout options to an extremely wide page (usually around 150") and after fiddling with the height it produces a PDF which essentially looks like galley view (the entire composition wide with no breaks).
Then I take this in to Adobe After Effects with a rendering of the audio file and keyframe the score scrolling left to right. However this kind of thing could easily be achieved in any simple video software, free ones I’m sure too. Usually the process takes me about 10 minutes.
I have played around with adding a “playhead” cursor animating along, and while it totally works, I will say this aspect is kind of time-consuming since there appears to be no automatic way of moving it to the music - in other words, I have to manually keyframe the playhead to the score, so I decided against doing it myself. In my personal opinion it’s not entirely necessary although I understand its appeal.
If you are curious how it usually turns out here is a recent sample -
My audience are a combination of non-composers, film directors and artist friends etc., so I also have gone for more colorful video backgrounds rather than a traditional black on white, and also why I’m super concerned that this is arguably not that legible for a large orchestration - many of my viewers aren’t reading it anyway After Effects or any video program has made it easy for me to do this.
However, in the future if it’s easier to simply screengrab straight from Dorico, playhead and all, I’ll probably end up doing that because I’m lazy haha.
Having the playhead cursor visible has helped me in those specific situations where my video is used for composition review or used by the ensemble to learn-by-ear (usually for getting hints on the rhythms). i.e. It is helpful to be able to scroll/scrub through YouTube to a specific measure for playback.
For general purpose viewing/listening, I bet having a playhead cursor is probably more annoying than helpful, especially for the non-academic audience. Colorful backgrounds are preferred by this audience too. (i.e. functions as eye candy)
Een echte klassieker… Pas op: Youp schrijf je met ou.
(For everyone else: this is a great song about being served your pet rabbit at the christmas dinner — hilarious and horrible)
After Effects or any video program has made it easy for me to do this.