Category : Logic Pro

Many aspiring composers and sound designers have encountered this situation before: they decide to take on an independent film or game project (that has a picture-locked element to it) only to find that the video they receive does not have any time code on the screen.  This makes it difficult to communicate back with the other creative team about particular “hit points” in your score.  This is particularly useful if you are working from a distance.

Many editors have the technical capability and experience, of course, to do this with their available tools.  But… what if they don’t?  It turns out that if you have Logic Pro Studio, you have a nifty tool called Compressor that also comes with Final Cut Pro.  It’s MAIN function is to take a video and encode it to a multitude of different formats for quick distribution over the web, to DVD, to cell phones, etc.  You can even batch big video jobs and distribute the processing across multiple computers.  Nifty.  But, for our purposes in music land…. largely unnecessary.

However, in the video below I explain how you can re-encode the video so that it gets time code attached!

Sure, I know what you’re thinking… “when would I have to do that!?!”

Well, that’s what I would have said until lately when this became an issue!

Right now, in the studio I am running a “samples only” slave machine without a monitor or keyboard, relying simply on Apple’s built-in screen sharing feature to help me manage Kontakt on that machine.  All is going well until I decide to load another sample library onto the slave computer from some DVD-ROM’s I have and I run into this issue!  Using the eject key on my main computer’s keyboard does NOT translate “through” screen sharing to mean “eject the SLAVE MACHINE’s optical drive”.  Instead, it only ejects the master machine.  Oops!

After some searching around, I found that a feature DOES exist to create what is shown in the screen shot above – a way to eject the optical drive tray from the menu bar!

To set this up, simply navigate on your system to:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/

There will be a file in there called “Eject.menu”

Simply double-click this and presto!  You will have the option to click and eject!  Enjoy!

I’m a definite believer in cleaning house in order to be more creative.  For a composer, this means lots and lots of computer work.  Perhaps its setting up backups, cleaning out files, installing a new PCIe card or hard drive, updating (all!) your software programs and sample libraries.  Maybe calibrating your monitors.  Whatever it is, eliminating the clutter is a great move towards improving focus during some downtime. (more…)

As many folks know, in the MIDI protocol, there is actually a particular control number for volume which is CC#11.  However, in MIDI-speak this is called expression so as not to confuse anyone with the volume of a fader in a sequence.  However, in order to add life to your arrangements, it is often very practical to embed this expression information within the recording in real-time and then use the volume faders of your sequence to “balance” things later on in mix-down.

For a lot of folks, this is a mind-numbing process of drawing various shapes in some sort of editor.  For the luckier among us, our controller keyboard may have a port to plug in a continuous pedal of some kind.  Or, our keyboard may have some moveable faders that are hard-coded to transmit certain MIDI signals.  The question is: are any of these CC#11?  And if not, how can you “re-purpose” one to do this?

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Ah, finally!  Per Sweetwater’s handy NAMM summary, I just learned that EWQL will be releasing updated versions of both RA and Symphonic Choirs on the PLAY interface!  For many of us who use Intel Macs now this is a HUGE deal as these libraries essentially STOPPED working (unless you transferred things to Kontakt 3, etc.).  The new interfaces look very cool, especially the promise of WordBuilder being integrated INTO the plug-in and not a seperate application!  Here’s hoping!