Importing and or Syncing Video with Notion

[TroySterling]

Hello, I am a new member of the forum and considering purchasing Notion 3. I thought i'd see if anyone could answer my questions first.

1. I'm a long-time user of Finale and Sonar (started back when it was Cakewalk 3.1!). I am really discoraged with the current handling of notation within Sonar - as with every update it becomes less and less of a 'feature'. Finale has video options now but it seems to be more of an afterthought. It appears that Notion does not currently have a sync-able or import video-type feature. Is this something this is in the works or is anticipated for later versions?

2. Is there a work-around that anyone knows or would be willing to outline - i.e. syncing Notion with Sonar or Logic or whatever to achieve a sync with video?

3. I compose for film, television, etc. and am looking for a more intuitive way to do this. I'm a classically trained (BA in composition and performance) and am used to scoring to picture in a 'notation view' - and then MIDI data view/piano roll view and slider channels later. Is Notation a good choice for this approach?

Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

best regards,

Troy Sterling Nies
www.troysterling.com
www.troysterling.blogspot.com

[Admin]

Hello, I am a new member of the forum and considering purchasing Notion 3. I thought i'd see if anyone could answer my questions first.

1. I'm a long-time user of Finale and Sonar (started back when it was Cakewalk 3.1!). I am really discoraged with the current handling of notation within Sonar - as with every update it becomes less and less of a 'feature'. Finale has video options now but it seems to be more of an afterthought. It appears that Notion does not currently have a sync-able or import video-type feature. Is this something this is in the works or is anticipated for later versions?

2. Is there a work-around that anyone knows or would be willing to outline - i.e. syncing Notion with Sonar or Logic or whatever to achieve a sync with video?

3. I compose for film, television, etc. and am looking for a more intuitive way to do this. I'm a classically trained (BA in composition and performance) and am used to scoring to picture in a 'notation view' - and then MIDI data view/piano roll view and slider channels later. Is Notation a good choice for this approach?

Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

best regards,

Troy Sterling Nies
http://www.troysterling.com
http://www.troysterling.blogspot.com

Rewire!! Notion works great with either Sonar or Logic as rewire slave, then do your video in the host.

hope this helps!
Kyle

[pcartwright]

Rewire is definitely the way to go for the moment. There are a few downsides with rewire. though.

Notion seems to work at its best (less bugs and crashes) when in slave mode; however, in slave mode Notion can't control the tempo and you can't record directly to a staff.

I'd like to point to this thread (viewtopic.php?f=2&t=905&start=20) as it discusses using the Reaper feature to allow a rewire slave program to set the tempo for a project (I'm not sure if other DAWs have a feature like this). So far, this feature doesn't seem to work with Notion; I hope there will either be improvement to rewire or native support for video in the near future.

[TroySterling]

Thank you for the information, I'll definitely look into the thread you provided. I appreciate it greatly.

[TroySterling]

pccartwright - when you say you Notion will not allow recording directly to a staff when it is in slave, do you mean 'live' recording or step-entry or any sort of alterations to the staff/notes, etc.?

[Surfwhammy]

I visited your website for a few minutes, and I really like "The Whisperer" preview, which is stellar in every respect, as well as being a particular favorite style of cinematography, scripting, acting, and music . . .

Regarding what makes the most sense with respect to software and so forth, everything is considerably easier on the Mac, and my recommendation is the fastest Mac Pro you can afford, where the focus is on getting the most processors . . .

http://www.apple.com/macpro/

You can save a bit of money by getting additional memory and hard drives from Other World Computing, where both memory and hard drives are very easy to install on a Mac Pro . . .

For digital audio workstation (DAW) software, there tend to be two options for the Mac, where one is Logic and the other is Digital Performer (MOTU) . . .

http://www.apple.com/logicstudio/

http://www.motu.com/products/software/dp/

I use Digital Performer, and I use a MOTU 828mkII for the Firewire audio interface to get instruments and microphones digitized and input to the computer (2.8-GHz 8-core Mac Pro) . . .

http://www.motu.com/products/motuaudio/828mk3/

[NOTE: If you need more connections for XLR microphones, then the MOTU 8pre is use in conjunction with the MOTU 828mk3 for this purpose, and for reference another advantage of using a MOTU 828mkII or 828mk3 is that it allows a good bit of the audio processing to be done externally, which frees more computer resources for all the Notion 3 and Digital Performer stuff, although you can use Notion 3 on a Mac without needing an external Firewire or USB audio interface . . . ]

http://www.motu.com/products/motuaudio/8pre/

For video editing and so forth, I use Final Cut Express (Apple), which at present is sufficient for my video skill level and doing YouTube music videos, but at some point I will upgrade to Final Cut Studio (Apple) . . .

http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/

On the computer-based music composition side of things, even though I have a degree in Computer Science, it did not occur to me until a few months ago that people could do music composition on computers, and even though I learned a good bit about music notation, music theory, and all that stuff years ago, it also did not occur to me that I knew enough about it actually to use it, but so what . . .

So what!

As the curious consequence of becoming a bit obsessed with making sense of Flamenco music earlier this year, one of the first things I realized was that the rhythms are too elaborate for me to play on my real drumkit, so I did a bit of research, which soon led to discovering Notion 3, in part due to reading something about it at the IK Multimedia website with respect to Miroslav Philharmonik, where there is a special version of Notion 3 for that orchestral sampled-sound library, and I like IK Multimedia products, so this is how I wandered into Notion 3 . . .

The quite surprising aspect of discovering Notion 3 is that I also discovered that it is very easy for me to do all the music notation stuff, although I had to refresh my memory for a few of the various symbols, some of which are quite new, which basically took about 30 minutes or so, where the primary focus was on a way to do stacatto to make the notes crisper and more distinct, which is easy to do . . .

My primary music theory background is influenced by Joseph Schillinger's "System of Musical Composition (SoMC)", which I understand more conceptually and mathematically than musically, at least with respect to formal music theory, which in part is due to playing by ear for most of the past half century, with this being a matter mostly of there being no readily available sheet music for popular songs years ao, so I switched to learning songs by listening to records and so forth and so on . . .

Yet, after discovering that I can use Notion 3 in a strange type of "play by ear" mode in conjunction with what I know about music notation and music theory, my new strategy is to create what I call a "basic rhythm section" in Notion 3 and then to use this basic rhythm section instead of a pair of reference tone and kick drum tracks in Digital Performer for purposes of what colloquially is called "click track" . . .

I get the Notion 3 computer-generated instrument tracks into Digital Performer as what it calls "soundbites" by controlling Notion 3 via ReWire, where Digital Performer is the ReWire controller, and I simply set the ReWire channels and then record the Notion 3 tracks, which gets it into Digital Performer as soundbites . . .

And since I use a Notion 3 basic rhythm section as the "click track" in Digital Performer, I can record real instruments and voices in Digital Performer but later can add more orchestration in Notion 3, followed by getting the newly added orchestration into Digital Performer, as described (see above) . . .

The logistics on doing this are not so complex, and I have devised a very nice set of techniques for doing it essentially without being concerned for limitations and so forth . . .

At present, as best as I have been able to determine, there is an arbitrary 51 track upper limit in Notion 3 for the Mac, but I make copies of the basic rhythm section and then simply replace instruments when I need more than 51 instruments, where each instrument maps to a stereo track in Notion 3 . . .

Basically, it is a variation of "ping-ponging" as it was done with analog magnetic tape machines in the 1950s, 1960s, and so forth, but instead of "ping-ponging" via tape machines, I use clones of Notion 3 project files for the Notion 3 stuff, and on the Digital Performer side, I use its "bounce to disk" feature, which is used to combine a set of tracks into a single soundbite, which then replaces the original set of tracks and in turn frees those tracks for use on other instruments and voices . . .

This is important to understand, because there are limits to everything, and these techniques are an excellent way essentially to have no arbitrary limits . . .

In other words, I can do a Notion 3 basic rhythm section with 500 separate instruments, but I do it via a relatively simple set of cloning operations . . .

And I can have thousands of tracks in a Digital Performer project, but I do it by recording a few tracks at a time and then doing the "bounce to disk" thing to create a soundbite, which after a while also can be combined, where I can do the "bounce to disk" thing for a set of soundbites to create a single soundbite, and so forth and so on, which simply is the digital version of what Phil Spector did in the late-1950s and early-1960s to create his "Wall of Sound" . . .

It takes a while to do all the digital ping-ponging and bouncing-to-disk, and all the Notion 3 project file cloning, but so what . . .

So what!

To the best of my knowledge, there is no recording, mixing, and mastering studio on this planet that actually as a 500-track mixing console, and so forth and so on . . .

Hence, who cares how it is done . . .

Not me!

What I care about is that I can do it in a practical way that does not take forever, which is the reason that I like Digital Performer and Notion 3, for sure . . .

For sure!

And regarding importing, synchronizing, and so forth, Digital Performer has synchronization stuff, as does Final Cut Studio . . .

On the Notion 3 side of the universe, as best as I can determine by reading a tiny bit of the user manual, it has a MIDI thing that is used with something called "NTempo" for purposes of performing a score, although I know absolutely nothing about it and at present have no need to know anything about it . . .

Yet, intuitively if you are using Notion 3 in conjunction with something like Digital Performer, then ultimately the sound will be coming from Digital Performer, and Digital Performer has synchronization stuff for video . . .

However, if what you really need to do is to be able to adjust a musical phrase by altering its tempo or duration, either arbitrarily via tempo or actively by adding, removing, or changing notes, then I think this is a more complex activity, where the Schillinger System of Musical Composition (SoMC) is quite handy, as well as being one of the best kept secrets in Hollywood, since it provides a virtual festival of techniques for doing this type of thing mathematically without needing to do so much actual composing work . . .

Is there a fast way to do this type of adjusting in a practical way in real-time on the fly?

Probably not, at least in situations where the director decides to add 10 seconds of new stuff to a scene that significantly alters everything . . .

But this is the reality with real instruments, although you can cut, copy, and paste stuff in Digital Performer to make changes to a song in the same way that one can do editing and splicing with magnetic tape and film . . .

From my perspective, if you already have the recorded stuff and just need to do a bit of cutting, copying, and pasting, this is very easy to do with Digital Performer, but if it requires adding new instruments playing a new set of notes and phrases, then essentially it is a new project type of thing, where nevertheless you can do it in Notion 3 with a bit of inserting measures, notes, instruments, cutting, copying, and pasting, and so forth and so on, which you then can import to Digital Performer via ReWire and all that stuff . . .

Hence, it really depends specifically on what you need to do, but I certainly think that there are straightforward ways to to just about everything in one way or another . . .

In other words, everything as some type of practical set of limitations, and this certainly is the case with everything one does on a computer, but from my perspective regarding computer stuff is that the key is to determine whether there are techniques and strategies that one can use to expand and to extend what otherwise are arbitrary limits, and so far I have found a way to get past every arbitrary limit I have encountered in Notion 3, which is excellent from my perspective . . .

There are faster Mac Pro computers that mine, but my Mac Pro is a high-end supercompter, and the fastest current Mac Pro will have quite arbitrary limitations in one way or another, which maps to the ongoing need to keep everything within the practical capabilities of the hardware and software . . .

As noted, there are quite a few ways to avoid encountering arbitrary limitations, either in software or in the resources of the hardware, so while the Mac Pro might slow to a crawl if I do something one way, there always is another way to produce the same result that is quite peppy, which mostly is all that matters to me from the perspective of everything being useful and productive . . .

Having a background in Computer Science and a lot of experience with analog magnetic tape machines and all the "old stuff" makes it much easier for me to devise alternate strategies, and based on my experiences so far, I am very comfortable with Notion 3 and Digital Performer with respect essentially to being able to do pretty much whatever I want to do . . .

Having 500 separate and independent instruments in Notion 3 might require me to create 11 clones of the original "basic rhythm section" Notion 3 project file, but on the Mac Pro that takes about 5 minutes, and then I can start doing the edits to the 500 instruments, one Notion 3 project clone at a time, after which I can import all that stuff, a little bit at a time, into Digital Performer, where every so often I do the "bounce to disk" thing to create soundbites, and then do another set of "bounce to disk" operation to combine soundbites, and so forth and so on, which overall probably takes several hundred hours, but so what . . .

So what!

The reality is that it takes longer to do it with real instruments when you multiply the number of hours by the number of musicians, audio engineers, producers, composers, and so forth and so on . . .

And actually having 500 separate and independent instruments is a bit wacky, anyway, except that one of the truly stellar things I discovered is that I can take a single instrument and then clone it perhaps as many as eight times, followed by replacing notes with rests in some type of geometrical pattern, which makes it possible to create elaborate motion within what I call the "Spherical Sonic Landscape™", where one vector plane of the Spherical Sonic Landscape is my avator for this forum . . .

In other words, since each instrument in Notion 3 has a stereo track, you can set the panning very precisely, and with the notes of one instrument spread over eight cloned instrument tracks where the notes then are spread via replacing them with rests such that each note is played by a different cloned instrument in some sequence, the result is that the notes for a single instrument can move in elaborate motions with the Spherical Sonic Landscape, as you can hear in this quite silly song that is a bit of a parody of "Bad Romance" (Lady Gaga), where metaphorically I am spanking Lady Gaga for not having any electric guitars in her song, which is fabulous . . .

[NOTE: This is best enjoyed while listening with studio-quality headphones like the SONY MDR-7506 (a personal favorite), and all the instruments so far are done with Notion 3 using several sampled-sound libraries, including some of the IK Multimedia sampled-sound libraries. Once I finish adding the sparkles, which are the apparently random bits of stuff that appear every so often in different places, I will do the real electric guitars and then add backup harmony vocals, along with the French bits, which basically is a set of nonsensical phrases in French heard in the background during the part of the video where I plan to do a rather silly bit of dancing with highly suggestive thrusting hip motions while wearing ballet tights with an impressive codpiece, pointy-toed slippers, a Venetian mask, and an enormous Elvis-style pompadour wig, since Lady Gaga really needs to be spanked for not having electric guitars in "Bad Romance" . . . ]

http://www.surfwhammys.com/Im-Going-Goo ... 010-MP.mp3

Fabulous! :)

P. S. I also do a bit of Classical, Flamenco, and Jazz stuff, but at present I am quite focused on writing songs about ladies underpants for the Surf Whammys fifth album ("Electric Underpants"), where one of the songs is "(I Want) Angela Gossow's Underpants (Ya-Ya-Ya)", which will be released as soon as I get around to finishing the second, third, and fourth albums, for sure . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecAFV-6rQ7Q

For sure!

However, another of my projects that I started 20 years ago was to teach myself how to play grand piano without actually playing or practicing grand piano, which is coming along very nicely since I reconfigured my brain to use the Frontal Eye Fields (FEF) region in conjunction with my auditory cortex toward the goal of being able to play extraordinarily rapid sequences of notes without any immediately conscious awareness of what I am doing at the time, which so far has been quite effective in making me a master of the Twelve Tone Technique or Dodecaphony that was devised by Arnold Schoenberg in the 1920s, as demonstrated in this sua sponte bit of grand piano that was composed and played in real-time on the fly precisely one time, albeit through a rather elaborate set of cascading echo units, and if nothing else is clear and indisputable evidence that it is possible to get in touch with one's inner idiot savante, really . . .

http://www.surfwhammys.com/music/11_Starlight_2.2_Grand_Piano.mp3

Really!

[pcartwright]

pccartwright - when you say you Notion will not allow recording directly to a staff when it is in slave, do you mean 'live' recording or step-entry or any sort of alterations to the staff/notes, etc.?

I'm talking about live recording. Other input methods seem to work fine; if anyone has had better luck doing live recording into Notion while in rewire slave mode, please let me know.

[pcartwright]

It appears that Notion does not currently have a sync-able or import video-type feature. Is this something this is in the works or is anticipated for later versions?

I really hope that Notion includes some form of time code sync in the future; I love rewire, but time code syncing would probalby be more beneficial to film/media scoring than rewire.

[themeworks]

Yes, N3 MUST support native quicktime, MP4, H264 or WMV video (and allow it to be sent out firewire or 2nd display) in addition to a window.

a) needs native video support - and multiple videos, not just one chunk
b) needs timecode support - all manners
c) needs sync - lock to other things beyond rewire
d) needs flutters/streamers in addition to timecode windows, superimposed on video
e) needs timecode and measure staves - resizable and relocatable
f) needs markers and marker layout/visual control, editing window, etc. (like rehearsal marks)
g) needs to import markers and cuts from video, like FC
h) needs to ALLOW RESIZE TIME SIGNATURES to LARGE for full score, parts
i) needs to provide way to select multiple attachments and align vertically on a stave/system
j) needs to fix the dodgy metronome
k) needs to allow more quantization control options (input quant) than just tuplets

[pcartwright]

c) needs sync - lock to other things beyond rewire

Check out this thread:

viewtopic.php?f=16&t=1470&p=6145&hilit=midi+sync#p6145