Review : Sonicfire Pro

Will the real Maestro please stand up ?

A problem commonly faced by videographers is scoring the project. Professional movie producer have the liberty of hiring songwriters, conductors and whole orchestra's to write custom songs for their masterpiece. The music is often used to set the mood for the movie or accentuate certain elements, or simply to build suspense. The combination of moving images underlined with a great soundtrack are a guarantee for a hit.

But alas, this is something that stays out of reach for most videographers. Unless you have musical talent yourself, or you know somebody with a band, you will have to use off-the shelf music.

But using existing music poses problems as well. Often the music doesn't match exactly the genre you need, nor does it match the length of the video . And then there is the problem with Copyrights. You can't just use a piece of music in a production. While this works for your home movies, you can't distribute or sell your production. Licensing existing music an be very expensive.

One option is to buy so called royalty free music .There are companies out there that sell soundtracks specifically for Movie productions. You buy the right o use one or more tracks. You can then mix these off into the final product and redistribute them But then you're still faced with the problem that their duration or buildup might not necessarily match what you are looking for.

Well now there is a solution to these problems. SonicFire Pro. This program allows you to create royalty-free soundtracks at Cd-quality. Let's have a look how this works.

If you buy the Bundle edition, Sonicfire Pro comes with 4 royalty free music disks and additional royalty free music disks are available from sonic Desktop's web site.

The installation CD-rom hold both Pc and Macintosh version of this program. Depending on the version you bought you will have a different CD key. The physical CD rom is the same.

The music disks hold two versions of the stored tracks. There is a 22KHz sampled stereo version (radio/tv quality) and a 44.1 KHz sampled stereo version ( CD quality ). The CD's included in the Bundle come with unlock keys for the 44KHz samples.

The included CD's cover a broad spectrum of video projects.

• Maximum action is great for high speed, action packed sequences
• The Edge Series Vol1 has a Techno-trance background great for both action and relax scenes.
• Dimensions sweeps from Folk music, over rock to classical music. You are bound to find something here to match your video.
• Scoring Essentials targets real cinematic moods. Everything from suspense to holidays, documentaries, romance and Sci-Fi style music is on this disk

The user interface on PC and Mac has exactly the same layout and is split in 3 main area's.

The top half of the screen is the editing pane. Here you arrange the individual sound elements on a timeline. For people used to video editing this will be a very familiar approach.

The bottom half of the screen is split between a video preview panel and a music element browser. The video panel can be used to load your video and see it at the same time you are coring i using this program. The video timeline is locked onto the audio timeline so during the playback they stay in sync. The top of this video panel also shows the VU meter of the audio track you are composing.

The element browser shows you all individual elements of a specific source file you open. You can open multiple source files at any given time.

Editing is a matter of drag and drop. To pre listen to an element just double click it in the browser. To place it on the timeline just drag it from the browser to the timeline. You can use the same element as many times as you want.

The timeline window also has the possibility of showing you the actual waveform of the audio signal, but a much more interesting function is volume control. Just click the volume control icon and the editing bar will appear.

Volume editing is similar to editing audio in Adobe Premiere, so people used to that editor will have no trouble at all. To add a point just do a right click and select -ADD point-. to control the volume all you need to do is move these points up or down. A red line represents the volumetric changes that will happen.

The maestro is a program that users of Adobe premiere and Pinnacle's Studio DV should be familiar with.

Those programs have come with the Smartsound Quicktracks for a long time.

This is in essence the same program that is built into Smartsound sonicfire Pro. Except inside Sonicfire this is called the Maestro.

The Maestro is a program that can compose music for you starting from the sound files that are available. all you do is select a strip of music, specify how long the result needs to be an the Maestro module processes it.