PreSonus Blog

Orchestral Scoring in Studio One 2, Part 5. Video!

Part V: Video!

I’d like to talk a little bit about writing music for video in Studio One. I had to do a multimedia project at my university as an exam, so I made a short trailer-type video by using trailer from Ubisoft’s “Assassin’s Creed” video game, and I decided to score my own music for it using my orchestral template.

The process is pretty simple actually. All you need to do is import a video file in Studio One Video Player and it will automatically play whenever you click Play on the transport controls. (Studio One doesn’t have video tracks, by the way.) If you want to add marker positions for your video, you have to scroll through the video and place markers on the marker track when the appropriate scene shows in your video. I like to keep my transport bar count set to bars instead of frames, because when I am writing music for video I need to sync my music to it and still follow the proper musical­ beat.

I always take a look at the video cue a couple of times and think about what kind of music I am going to write for it. Then I start placing markers and name them to describe the scene that the video player is about to show.

 

Video Scoring


Placing markers is pretty much the same as in other DAWs. Find the place where you need to put marker, and click the “+” button on the left of the marker track, and you will see the marker tagged with a number on the marker track.You can rename the marker by double-clicking on it and typing in a name in the pop-up window.

Sometimes the time signature doesn’t fit the video, and you want the important scenes to change in a musically relevant manner, by following the time signature. Place a marker on that scene and right click above it and choose “set time signature.” The pop-up window will show and you can input your desired time signature. This is useful when syncing music to change right with the scene. For example: if your time signature is set to 4/4 and the scene is not changing exactly on the metronome’s beat, you will need to add or remove a couple of beats to perfect the timing. Here’s how the finished marker track looks after adding markers and time signature changes to the video:

Marker Track

 

Once you’ve done that, you are ready for some serious professional scoring.

I had a lot of fun with this project, and I am definitely seeing myself using PreSonus Studio One as my main DAW of choice from now on. Need I say that I’ve un-installed my other DAW I was using all these years? The guys from PreSonus are doing a great job with this and with some patches and new versions, StudioOne has a bright future in becoming the industry’s top DAW out there.

And feel free to visit my Youtube Channel. You can also listen to some of my tracks at Reverbnation and visit me on IMDb.

 

[Update! For your convenience, here’s the rest of the blogs in this series:

 

  1. Part One: Intro and DAW setup
  2. Part Two: Panning and placement of instruments
  3. Part Three: EQ
  4. Part Four: Reverb
  5. Part Five: Video