Light Productions

I assure everyone reading this that I am not being paid by Smartsound to talk about their product, although the way that I talk about it may make it sound that way.  Nope, not paid, just an extremely happy customer and user of this great program.  For anybody in the video field, whether you produce short videos for businesses or you are an indie producer, you have to check out Sonic Fire Pro for your music.  Sonic Fire has saved me countless hours scoring videos, which in the past has been one of my least favorite parts of post production.  You had to dig through a library, find a piece of music, and then force it to fit into your video by either fading it out at a hopefully natural spot, changing the length of your video a little bit to fit the music I chose, or paying to get a custom piece of music.  Sonic Fire Pro fixes all of these problems.

You do have to purchase libraries, but they are very reasonably priced and usually come with 10-12 songs in each library.  The great thing about it is that it is royalty free music, so once you buy the song, you can use it as much as you want and you don’t have to pay each time you use it, and it is all neatly organized within the program.  Another great feature is that most of the music is multi-track music, meaning that you can edit it right there in the program.  If you don’t want to hear drums, you can take out the drums.  Want more piano?  you can adjust it however you want, all with the same piece of music.  No extra purchases necessary.  They also include multiple variations of each song, with each variation having a slightly different feel, instrument arrangement, etc.  So, with one song, you may have up to 6 different unique variations of that song, and then all of the editing that you can do with it yourself.

And the last part that I addressed above, but not nearly the last great feature of this program, is getting the music to fit your video.  Probably the greatest feature of this program – You tell it how long you want the piece of music, and it edits it for you with an actual beginning and end to the song.  It doesn’t just fade out, it actually re-arranges the song and creates a custom version that is exactly the length you need.  You can see in the picture to the right how this looks.  I told it that I want my piece of music to be 1 minute, 23 seconds, and 7 frames, and it makes it exactly that length and even gives me a waveform preview of the last 4 seconds so I can see how the song ends.  You can see in the picture also where I could set the variation and mood of the piece.  Once I have it the way I want it, I hit insert and export it as an aiff file (or however you choose to export it).  There are other options here, including a plugin that interacts directly with Final Cut, but I will talk more about that in a later post.

There is so much more about this program that is just awesome, but I won’t go into all of that today.  If you are in the video production industry, you need to at least take a look at this program.  It is worth every penny, and for all that it can do, it’s doesn’t cost that much at all.  You can see all of the features of this video and audio scoring software at www.smartsound.com.  If you have any questions, as always feel free to leave a comment.  Thanks for reading.

- Daniel