Being in the video production business for about 20 years now, I’d say at least half of my colleagues are musicians of some sort. They are either in a band, sing in a choir, compose or do a combination of those things. I claim no such membership to that club. I can’t read music and I don’t play any instruments. The best I can say for myself in the musical realm is that I’ve been told by musicians that I mix their live shows well. That said, when I, like most everyone else, need music in my productions, the first place I turn to is SmartSound’s Quicktracks for Premiere Pro. If I need to get “really complicated,” I turn to SmartSound’s more sophisticated Sonicfire Pro. When Abaltat’s Muse 2.0 came my way I was expecting it to be something similar, using the colors in the video to magically arrange my tracks. It does, but you still need a bit more musical knowledge to create a really good final product.

First Impressions

The first thing you need to do is get your video into Muse to be analyzed. I started with what I thought would be an easy test – a five-minute 1080i HDV home video I shot at the Long Beach Aquarium in California. The final render was just under 1GB. When you launch Muse, you might think it’s not running at first. Check the change in the bar at the top of the OS X screen and the Muse logo on the bottom of the screen and you’ll see it has started. Once it’s up and running, use the finder to pick up the video from the folder it’s in and drop it on the logo. There is no progress bar to tell you anything is happening, so I couldn’t tell if my file was being read. I called the Abaltat PR person, Mark Altekruse, for help and was informed that the size of the file, not the length, affects the analysis time the most. He told me that a 1GB file would have a Apple 3.0 GHz Quad-core Mac Pro crunching away all day. He suggested rendering out a low-res QuickTime file. I rendered a new 20MB file in Premiere Pro CS3, dumped it into Muse, and had it analyzed in under two minutes.

Once a file is analyzed, two windows open up. One is a video playback window featuring a timeline where you can add key frames to adjust the musical comp that is spit out. The other window is the “Color Timeline.” The strength of nine colors (white, yellow, light green, blue, green, pink, red, lavender and orange) is measured throughout the video. When you play back the video it is easy to follow the strength of the colors on the chart on the screen. If you are using certain colors for effect in your video, Muse will mirror your work as a colorist – another nice way this program melds sound and picture.

Hitting the “compose” button in the playback window opens the compose dialog box. Here you choose the “band” or style of music. Muse ships with eight “bands,” from Hip Hop to orchestral. (Other styles will be available to purchase in the near future.) You can also choose which colors to focus on, as well as the tempo, complexity, jingle, drum pattern, time signature, and compose method.

Sound Crafting

In playing around with the different settings, I was able to create some usable music. However, if you are a non-musician like me, you may find yourself going through a lot of trial and error during your freshman outing. Mark Altekruse agreed with my assessment that producers and editors with a musical background will get even better results. But if you look at Muse as a tool to get you started, he added, it has far-reaching implications. Sure, you could start and finish in Apple GarageBand. But if you need something original – royalty-free but without the endless loops you’d need to score longer video projects – starting in Muse is a great, economical option. For best results, I’d put your final composition from Muse (you just need to export a MIDI file) into a program like GarageBand, Sony Acid, Digidesign Pro Tools, or Adobe Soundbooth or Audition to really tweak it out.

Trial and Error

I decided to leap-frog my initial attempts by sending Altekruse my video so that a trained specialist there could point out to me things I’d overlooked. The specialist first analyzed my video in Muse, then exported a MIDI file into GarageBand for finishing. He gave me his initial Muse settings, so I could replicate his work. I plugged them into Muse on the Mac Pro test system. What resulted was already better than anything else I tried to put out. The final output that went through GarageBand was a much better piece than a non-musician like me could have come up with otherwise.

So there’s your caveat. If you are a Mac-based video professional with a firm understanding of music, and you just need some help jumpstarting the creative process, Muse 2.0 is a terrific tool to add to your arsenal. If, on the other hand, you are musically challenged and work mostly on the Windows OS, like yours truly, you may have better luck with SmartSound’s Quicktracks or, for more control, Sonicfire Pro 5. As another option, Adobe’s new Soundbooth 2.0 now has sophisticated scoring tools for those of us lacking the innate ability. But if you are already on the Mac and know how to create music the old fashion way, this software tool will help you shine.